New PDF release: The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the

By A. J. Jacobs

ISBN-10: 0743250605

ISBN-13: 9780743250603

33,000 pages
44 million phrases
10 billion years of heritage
1 obsessed guy
Part memoir and half schooling (or lack thereof), The Know-It-All chronicles NPR contributor A.J. Jacobs's hilarious, enlightening, and doubtless very unlikely quest to learn the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z.
To fill the ever-widening gaps in his Ivy League schooling, A.J. Jacobs units for himself the daunting activity of interpreting all thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His spouse, Julie, tells him it's a waste of time, his associates think he's wasting his brain, and his father, a super lawyer who had as soon as tried an analogous feat and give up someplace round Borneo, is encouraging yet, lets say, unconvinced.
With self-deprecating wit and a disarming frankness, The Know-It-All recounts the unforeseen and comically disruptive results Operation Encyclopedia has on the whole lot of Jacobs's lifestyles -- from his newly minted marriage to his complex dating along with his father and the remainder of his charmingly eccentric long island relations to his day task as an editor at Esquire. Jacobs's undertaking exams the outer limits of his stamina and forces him to discover the genuine that means of intelligence as he endeavors to hitch Mensa, win a place on Jeopardy!, and take up 33,000 pages of studying. On his trip he stumbles upon a few of the strangest, funniest, and so much profound proof approximately each subject lower than the solar, all whereas struggling with fatigue, ridicule, and the paralyzing worry that attends his first real-life accountability -- the approaching delivery of his first baby.
The Know-It-All is an inventive, mightily wonderful memoir of 1 man's mind, neuroses, and obsessions and a soul-searching, eventually touching fight among the all-consuming quest for real wisdom and the indisputable present of hard-won knowledge.

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He knew. It’s when your pawn gets to the other side and you choose not to queen it, but instead turn it into a knight or a rook or bishop. And then he mates me. He mates me with authority, like the squid that uses a fourth arm to deliver its sperm cells. T H E K N OW- I T- A L L He shakes my hand. The match over, Jew-fro man turns out to be very nice. He takes the time to dissect my game for me, pointing out my many errors, but managing not to be condescending. He even tells me why the hell someone might want to underpromote—if a queen will cause a stalemate, but a castle will force a checkmate, you underpromote to castle.

The Fire Next Time” appeared in The New Yorker. ” So I had done it. I had made my first correction, and I corrected a brilliant man, to boot. I felt great. Well, actually I felt like kind of a dick. But also great. bell Back to the books. The world’s largest bell was built in 1733 in Moscow, and weighed in at more than four hundred thousand pounds. It never rang—it was broken by fire before it could be struck. What a sad little story. All that work, all that planning, all those expectations—then nothing.

I don’t honestly think that the folks from the MacArthur genius grant will be kicking down my door. But I also believe that there is some link between knowledge and intelligence. Maybe knowledge is the fuel and intelligence is the car? Maybe facts are the flying buttresses and intelligence is the cathedral? J. Jacobs I don’t know the exact relation. But I’m sure the Britannica, somewhere in those 44 million words, will help me figure it out. augury You can predict the future based on dice (cleromancy), dots on paper (geomancy), fire and smoke (pyromancy), entrails of sacrificed animals (haruspicy), animal livers (hepatoscopy), or shoulder blades of animals (scapulimancy).

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