The Know-It-All By A.J. Jacobs Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $25 Buy this book more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (14) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

Early he's one of us feeling is undermined by Jacobs's eagerness to confess his shortcomings (Beckett who?) and consistently ham-fisted punchlines (e.g., "You can't get a much bigger transformation than that, unless . . . Mother Teresa went through a phase as a loan shark"). Like other factophiles, he shows off his Brit bits with little discretion (compulsion is the autodidact's curse), in what seems a bid to break everybody's goodwill. Humanizing plotstuff comes via his struggles to live up to lawyer-author dad and impregnate his wife, which might further stereotypes about smart dudes' less cerebral powers. Still, the enormity of the task is impressive: "33,000 pages, 65,000 articles . . . thirty-two volumes . . . 44 million words." There are moments of genuine wonder, like when he discovers that a "kilogram is now defined as the weight of a hunk of metal sitting in this building outside of Paris." Did you know the Taiping Rebellion "took an estimated 20,000,000 lives"? He's "barely even heard" of it. Corn is out as he contemplates the meaning of his ignorance and, movingly, turns on the EB for the first time: "Shouldn't it say, 'took an infuckingsane 20 million lives'?" Some tired wit and a predictable "everything is connected" conclusion don't seriously lame his de facto project, this book. Maybe Lou MacNeice got to the point quicker ("World is crazier and more of it than we think"), but Jacobs gives an idea of what that world looks like.