Wednesday, October 04, 2006

The Know-It-All

Today I received a request from half.com to review a book I ordered about a month ago. The email was amazingly timed within a hour of my finishing the book, and since I thoroughly enjoyed every page, I decided to acquiesce and wrote the following review:



If you know how to read, this book is a must-have.

Have you ever noticed there's some pretty fascinating stuff in the encyclopedia (with an awful lot of less fascinating information mixed in). This book gives you a good percentage of the highlights, as well as laugh-out-loud-funny anecdotes from the life of a guy with the patience/gumption/insanity to read it all. All 33,000 pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Believe it or not, this book is actually a page-turner. Somewhere between A-ak and Zywiec, you start to relate to this self-effacing guy (who, in reality, is probably 3.7 times smarter than most of us) and become genuinely interested in the success of his quest.

On another level, The Know-It-All is like the Krispy Kreme’s of its kind, allowing you to watch the process of its creation as the book itself unfolds. Its transparency is both insightful and endearing. The writing process takes you into his office, on the NY Subway and to a personal interview with Alex Trebek. It culminates with a visit to Britannica headquarters, which sincerely fascinates you by the time you arrive there in the book.

I recommend this book to everyone.

3 Comments:

Blogger vine street said...

Wow, sounds like a real find. I'm in a book club right now, so maybe I will read it and then recommend it. Did it make you want to read an entire encyclopedia, or just grateful that someone else did it for you?

I'm reading Kite Runner right now...very raw and at times very troubling..but I'm addicted. I think I'm going to have to finish it tonight.

7:04 PM  
Blogger cropstar said...

I think I know what my next book is gonna be!! Great review Krara.

Also... kite runner. I read that in a scary basement in the middle of the night. As if the book wasn't (weren't?) troubling enough I went and added a troubling atmosphere in which to read. Thus, it is not on my list of recommendations. But hope you like it Kristen.
cheers

9:17 AM  
Blogger Kara said...

This would be a great book club book. It even has some depth to it—the definition of wisdom, making sense of all the good and bad in the world’s history. There’s some good book-club stuff in there.

I don't know about reading the whole encyclopedia-- it took the author a year, during which time his wife referred to herself as an "encyclopedia widow". However, it reminded me of the days when my siblings and I occasionally entertained ourselves by looking for "cool stuff" in our World Book encyclopedias.

Another encyclopedia memory---
Just a few years ago, I came home for the weekend. My little sister Emily (then 6ish) was sleeping in the living room and woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. She wanted me to read to her, and I didn’t want to go all the way upstairs to get a book, so we picked an encyclopedia off the shelf and looked at the pictures of fish. Some of them are pretty funny looking and have names that are hilarious to a six-year old. We laughed our heads off for nearly an hour. I felt like the coolest big sister in the world when I heard her telling Mom about it the next day.

11:12 AM  

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