Book description
On leaving school or university, you feel pretty pleased with
yourself. You've learnt a lot, your'e well-read and you know a whole
bunch of obscure facts guaranteed at some point to appear in the
questions on Mastermind or University Challenge. Then you get a job,
and ten years later youre more eloquent and eager to argue about
Britney and Big Brother than Beckett and the Brontes. Sound familiar?
Well it happened to AJ Jacobs too. As an editor at Esquire,
Jacobs had built up a rather impressive knowledge of celebrity trivia
- and the cure was going to take a long time. While others might take
to reading a broadsheet at the weekend, Jacobs chose to read the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. All 33,000 pages of it.
Bill Bryson meets Schott's Original Miscellany meets Woody
Allen. Part assemblage of fascinating trivia, part journey
through adulthood, all laugh-out-loud funny.
A. J. Jacobs is the editor of
What It Feels Like
and the author of
The Two Kings: Jesus and Elvis,
America Offline
, and
Fractured Fairy Tales
. He is a senior editor of Esquire and lives in New York City with his
wife Julie.
