The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Person
In The World

Product Description

On leaving school or university, you feel pretty pleased with yourself. You've learnt a lot, your'e well-read & 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, & ten years later youre more eloquent & eager to argue about Britney & Big Brother than Beckett & 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
- & 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.