The Encyclopedia Makes You Smarter?

One of the reasons that motivated me to read The Know-It-All was that he summarized the encyclopedia within the book. I had hoped that by reading the book by A.J. Jacobs I could extract intelligent from a secondary source. I never regret this decision because I find that I am chuckling to myself as I read this story. The author is so open about his opinions of others and with his personal life, not afraid that the person he is bashing on can easily open his book and find him talking about him or her in such a manner.

The book talks about A.J. Jacobs’s life as he attempts to read the Britannica in the hope of restoring lost knowledge he had learned in his paid years at Brown University. He credits his dad for this idea because he had tried to do exactly so years before but gave up after finishing a few letters. Jacobs plans to continue where is dad has left off and finish it all the way through. The story is set up from A-Z in which he summarizes a few words and goes off to tell a story related with the words and resumes with his summaries of the Britannica.

I am not far into the story as of right now, but I feel that the authors writes this story to tell his readers having all the knowledge of the encyclopedias is redundant and futile if the possessor of that knowledge does not know what to do with it. He or she might decide to accumulate it and allows nothing productive to stem from knowing so much. He read the encyclopedia to be smarter, yet he finds it hard to put his knowledge to use in real life scenarios.