Hollywood was founded by a man named Horace Wilcox, “a prohibitionist who envisioned it a community based on his sober religious principles,” comments A. J. Jacobs, author of the enticing and educational The Know-It-All. “But other than that, Jacobs continues, “Mr. Wilcox would probably not be overjoyed.”
Who knows what Mr. Wilcox would make of the joy of looking up, or about committing random facts of mindfulness? The subtitle of Know-It-All gives a little more of an indication of what this purposefully scattershot book is all about: One Man’s Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Person In The World. Jacobs, senior editor of Esquire, in fulfilling a lifetime goal, undertakes the unthinkable to pen the kitchen-sink-and-all book that relates his experience in reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in order from a-ak to zywiek. We’re along for the ride, by twists and turns succinctly trivial-pursuit-esque, and, if you care to negotiate the hairpin learning curves, edifyingly erudite.
Because I once harbored similar, overly ambitious hopes, I thought, with delusions of smarty pants grandeur once removed (or completely de-pantsed), that I could engage in a cover-to-cover reading of Jacobs’ ladder to Jeopardy! with some kind of microcosmic vicariousness - a not-to-scale quixotic tipping at encyclopedic windmills. My impulsive, undisciplined impatience was bound to derail any systematic approach, even with this especially condensed, with-commentary compendium of eclectic encyclo-sampling. I was not meant to partake of food for thought - whether junk or gourmet - volume-by-volume, course-by-course; I continually spoil my appetite with spontaneous and reckless I’ll-have-what-he’s-having curiosity impulsively piqued.
So, with cavalier whilly-nillyness intact, my attention-deficit madness to the method assured that, in reading Know-It-All, I would keep getting sidetracked even in the course of inadvertently spotting an intriguing topic on another page, or when Jacobs’ makes reference to another issue that I’ve just got to check out - is this subject cited separately? If it’s not, more often than not, my eyes and attention drift to something anew, and again: I’ve just got to check that out.
It was via this mental hop-scotching that I landed on the subject of the afore-bandied-about Hollywood and, after having taken note of the city’s puritanical beginnings (scratching the phony tinsel to get to the real tinsel underneath, as American wit Oscar Levant put it) I casually scanned down to the topic of Humor. Hey, I like humor as much as the next guy, priest, minister or rabbi, but I can’t tell a standard joke past the “man walks into a bar” set-up to save my life. Jacobs, although an amusing sort, proves to be not much more adept in his decision to illustrate the you-had-to-be-there history of humor by retelling a circa-1700s Japanese joke about the boss of the monkeys who “orders his one thousand monkey followers to get the moon that’s reflected in the water.”
Article comments
1 - Scott Butki
Good review. Did you see my interview with the author?
2 - Richard Welch
I would question the value of a book that, from what is written in at least one review on this site, has a most glaring error that is nothing but a repeat of erroneous information from Encyclopedia Britannica. Horace Wilcox, my great-grandfather, did not found Hollywood. Rather, it was his brother Harvey Henderson Wilcox who founded the city in California that is so well know around the world.