The Gimmick Book

I finished this book some time ago, and it has been sitting on my desk waiting to be reviewed herein, and so at long last I am getting to the review.  The reason that the foregoing fact is worthy of note is that the delay in reviewing it is inherently related to the nature of the book itself; indeed, this book present a rather challenging problem for composing a satisfactory review.

The book?  A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.  This book was given to me by Janet for Christmas.  Determining why, out of the universe of books, Janet would pick this one is left as an exercise for the reader.  That being said, I enjoyed reading it, and so the solution may simply be that Janet knew I would enjoy reading it.

This book is part of what I will hereby dub the genre of Gimmick Book.  Gimmick Books are epitomized by the most well-known book in that genre Julie and Julia, in which one woman sets out to cook every recipe in a famous cookbook and spins said rather pointless activity into a book and then a major motion picture starring an A-list actress.  Jacobs' Gimmick is to read the Encyclopedia Britannica, all of it from A-ak to Zywiec.  He did it, and wrote a book about it, but I have heard no tales of a forthcoming movie in which Jacobs is played by Matt Damon. 

The book itself is organized alphabetically.  Entries for the encyclopedia form the sections in which we are told either curious facts about said entry or tales from Jacobs' life which somehow relate to the entry in question.  Jacobs is a pleasantly amusing writer; it is a casually fun book.  And it is packed with a huge assortment of oddly curious facts.  There are a lot of oddly curious things in this world. That is the reviewing problem--how does one summarize a book in which the predominant pleasure is derived from reading strange things which do not stick in the memory.  Or at least my memory.  Jacobs recalls some of the things he reads, and he relates highly amusing tales of how he trots out useless facts at assorted dinner parties, after which his wife tells him he needs to stop relating so many useless facts at dinner parties.

So, what did I learn?  I really can't remember.  The most memorable story in the book was Jacobs telling about how his father, who was fond of rather odd jokes, would, when asked by his host at a cocktail party what drink he would like, ask for a Yellow Lightning.  The host, having never heard of said drink would ask what it was, to which Jacobs' father would say that it is two-parts Lemon Kool-Aid and one part Tequila.  His theory was that nobody in the country would have both of those ingredients.  Nobody ever did.  What surprised me was the realization that I think I could make a Yellow Lightning for him as long as he wasn't a connoisseur of Kool-Aid like drinks--we generally have some variant of Kool-Aid (but not necessarily the Name Brand) in the house, and I also usually have Tequila.

And therein lies the problem with the Gimmick book.  It's a Gimmick.  Why would anyone want to read the Encyclopedia?  Was it just so he could write a Gimmick book?  (I think it probably was.) And, why does he think doing so makes him smarter?  Isn't that confusing intelligence and knowledge?  Does anybody know the distinction between those two things anymore?

All that being said, Janet was right in buying the book--for reasons I cannot explain, I did enjoy it.