When you just know that you are not a Jackass
A few months ago you may have seen this guy on TV or heard an interview on public radio with him. A. J. Jacobs recently published a book The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Man in the World. It is about his reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end. It is even as he describes it, light-hearted.
The New York Times reviewed it. They didn't even need to bring out the notoriously vicious Michiko Kakutami, but Joe Queenan who was brutal. I wonder, though, if Queenan had a different axe to grind, so to speak. When he wrote this exerpt below, I don't think he was just angry at Jacobs or his book.
A graduate of the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan and Brown University, Jacobs is a prime example of that curiously modern innovation: the pedigreed simpleton. Blithely confessing to Brobdingnagian gaps in his knowledge even before he started reading the encyclopedia, Jacobs seems unaware that without some sort of mentor to shield him from his staggering lack of sophistication, he will seem more ignorant when his self-improvement project is over than when it began. Jacobs's biggest problem isn't that he doesn't know much; it's that he doesn't realize how much educated people do know. There's just no two ways about it -- people who read Marcel Proust and Bertrand Russell instead of Entertainment Weekly actually do learn stuff.
(There was a guy I heard on Terry Gross several years ago that also commented on this sort of phenomenom. He talked about walking from the back of the plane to the front to get to the lavatory. In the rear of the plane, in coach, he sees people absorbed in their Faulkner and Melville, underlining passages in some biography by Stephen Ambrose. As he passes through business class, he sees people reading non-fiction, but more in the vein of Seven Habits or Tom Peters. If they are reading novels, it is more like Grisham. And then when he passes through first class finally to get to the lavatory, everyone is sleeping. The more financially successful or fortunate in America these days are not interested in general in more intellectual pursuits. But I not-uncharateristically digress)
Jacobs rebuts, hilariously. Bookmark this or save it to read when you have had a crummy day. I am going to exerpt the same passage Amy Welborn did on her blog because it really does sum up Jacobs' experience. I am giving her credit because I want to show that I am not a jackass.
I experienced plenty of strange things in the weeks following the publication of my book. I got to meet my one and only rabid fan -- a man who took off his sweater to reveal passages of my book scrawled on his T-shirt in Magic Marker. I got to see firsthand the alarmingly high average age of the American reader -- at one event, there were no fewer than three women with oxygen tanks in the front row (reminder to self: write more books fast). I got to spend an awkward hour in a greenroom alone with Dionne Warwick.
But nothing -- absolutely nothing -- was as strange as the review I received in these very pages. This was no ordinary write-up. After a blissful monthlong honeymoon with the critics, my book -- called ''The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World,'' a lighthearted account of the year I spent reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica -- got one of the most mean-spirited reviews in the 154-year history of The New York Times. The writer -- a humorist named Joe Queenan -- seemed genuinely angry with me, as if I had transported his niece across state lines. He called me a simpleton. He said I was so dumb, I wasn't even ''the smartest person at Entertainment Weekly'' (the magazine where I used to work). He referred to me as a ''jackass.'' A jackass. In The New York Times Book Review. I flipped around to the other reviews. Did they call Philip Roth a doofus? Did they call Gish Jen a nitwit? No, just me. A jackass.
The New York Times reviewed it. They didn't even need to bring out the notoriously vicious Michiko Kakutami, but Joe Queenan who was brutal. I wonder, though, if Queenan had a different axe to grind, so to speak. When he wrote this exerpt below, I don't think he was just angry at Jacobs or his book.
A graduate of the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan and Brown University, Jacobs is a prime example of that curiously modern innovation: the pedigreed simpleton. Blithely confessing to Brobdingnagian gaps in his knowledge even before he started reading the encyclopedia, Jacobs seems unaware that without some sort of mentor to shield him from his staggering lack of sophistication, he will seem more ignorant when his self-improvement project is over than when it began. Jacobs's biggest problem isn't that he doesn't know much; it's that he doesn't realize how much educated people do know. There's just no two ways about it -- people who read Marcel Proust and Bertrand Russell instead of Entertainment Weekly actually do learn stuff.
(There was a guy I heard on Terry Gross several years ago that also commented on this sort of phenomenom. He talked about walking from the back of the plane to the front to get to the lavatory. In the rear of the plane, in coach, he sees people absorbed in their Faulkner and Melville, underlining passages in some biography by Stephen Ambrose. As he passes through business class, he sees people reading non-fiction, but more in the vein of Seven Habits or Tom Peters. If they are reading novels, it is more like Grisham. And then when he passes through first class finally to get to the lavatory, everyone is sleeping. The more financially successful or fortunate in America these days are not interested in general in more intellectual pursuits. But I not-uncharateristically digress)
Jacobs rebuts, hilariously. Bookmark this or save it to read when you have had a crummy day. I am going to exerpt the same passage Amy Welborn did on her blog because it really does sum up Jacobs' experience. I am giving her credit because I want to show that I am not a jackass.
I experienced plenty of strange things in the weeks following the publication of my book. I got to meet my one and only rabid fan -- a man who took off his sweater to reveal passages of my book scrawled on his T-shirt in Magic Marker. I got to see firsthand the alarmingly high average age of the American reader -- at one event, there were no fewer than three women with oxygen tanks in the front row (reminder to self: write more books fast). I got to spend an awkward hour in a greenroom alone with Dionne Warwick.
But nothing -- absolutely nothing -- was as strange as the review I received in these very pages. This was no ordinary write-up. After a blissful monthlong honeymoon with the critics, my book -- called ''The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World,'' a lighthearted account of the year I spent reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica -- got one of the most mean-spirited reviews in the 154-year history of The New York Times. The writer -- a humorist named Joe Queenan -- seemed genuinely angry with me, as if I had transported his niece across state lines. He called me a simpleton. He said I was so dumb, I wasn't even ''the smartest person at Entertainment Weekly'' (the magazine where I used to work). He referred to me as a ''jackass.'' A jackass. In The New York Times Book Review. I flipped around to the other reviews. Did they call Philip Roth a doofus? Did they call Gish Jen a nitwit? No, just me. A jackass.
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