Word: britannicas
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...USED TO BE NICE TO sit next to A.J. Jacobs at a dinner party. He's funny, smart, polite and totally nonthreatening-looking. But ever since he read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica--which he did to write his hilarious book, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (Simon & Schuster; 386 pages)--it is best to sit far, far away. His blurting of arcana has got so bad, his wife started fining him $1 for every irrelevant fact he crowbarred into conversation. "She was lenient," he told TIME. "I got away...
...book succeeds because, unlike in real life, Jacobs (an Esquire editor and NPR contributor) confines his written observations on Encyclopaedia Britannica articles to jottings the length of entries in Schott's Original Miscellany. (Among the facts he highlights: the Bayer company invented heroin; toward the end of his life, Nathaniel Hawthorne constantly scribbled "64" on scraps of paper; René Descartes liked cross-eyed chicks.) Instead, he uses his book, which is organized by Encyclopaedia Britannica entries, to do what he has done best as a magazine writer: stunt journalism. The entry on "Vital Fluid" leads to a story about getting...
...Bildungsroman. The project, it seems, springs less from an urge to soak up information than from a desire to confront his Oedipus complex. His brilliant lawyer father, who is so competitive that he holds the record for most footnotes in a legal article, once attempted to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica but quit in the B's. But even more important to Jacobs' emotional maturation than one-upping his dad is dealing with the tension of failing, over and over, to get his wife pregnant. Although, really, you don't expect a guy who goes to the Britannica headquarters in Chicago...
...stunt of the book itself that allows the funny, touching memoir to be so stuffed with nutritious bits of trivia that you feel smart for reading it. Jacobs has done the time-consuming work of unearthing the most interesting parts of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Seriously, Descartes liked cross-eyed women.) "There were times during the 'Plate Tectonics' section I regretted starting it," he says. "But now I'm happy. At least I've accomplished something in my life." That, in the end, is what the book is about, and it has nothing to do with reading the Britannica...
Thus were born the new American services, which since 1990 have fought five wars--in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq--with outstanding success. Even a superpower, however, is only as good as the forces through which it exercises that power. But Pax Americana, like Pax Britannica, is guaranteed by a body of servicemen and -women who have no equal elsewhere on the globe...