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A review by nabenn67
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs
3.0
Growing up we had two sets of encylopedias: the World Book and the Encyclopaedia Britannca. (My parents had 6 kids -- these things were well used for decades). I think about 4th or 5th grade I decided it would be fun to read the whole thing -- but only the World Book because it was shorter and the print was bigger. Unlike AJ's father, who made it to the B's, I think I might have read 20 articles from the A's before I lost interest, so I have to applaud someone who actually accomplished this feat.
AJ Jacobs read the entire Britannica, A-Z, and takes us on the journey with him. He sprinkles knowledge about the some topics with anecdotes from his personal life. I've read his later works and thoroughly enjoyed them and this was enjoyable enough, though not as much as the others. Maybe it was the topic - there is only so much personal information you can correlate to the strange and varied topics in the Encyclopedia. All in all a very solid 3 with various spikes to a 4-star rating.
AJ Jacobs read the entire Britannica, A-Z, and takes us on the journey with him. He sprinkles knowledge about the some topics with anecdotes from his personal life. I've read his later works and thoroughly enjoyed them and this was enjoyable enough, though not as much as the others. Maybe it was the topic - there is only so much personal information you can correlate to the strange and varied topics in the Encyclopedia. All in all a very solid 3 with various spikes to a 4-star rating.