Jacobs, A.J. 1968- (Arnold Steven Jacobs, Jr.)

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Jacobs, A.J. 1968- (Arnold Steven Jacobs, Jr.)

PERSONAL:

Born March 20, 1968, in New York, NY; married Julie Schoenberg. Education: Attended Brown University.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Esquire, 250 W. 55th St., New York, NY 10019. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Worked as a journalist for Antioch Daily Ledger and Entertainment Weekly; Esquire, New York, NY, editor.

WRITINGS:

The Two Kings, Bantam Books (New York, NY), 1994.

America Off-line: The Complete Outernet Starter Kit, Calder Books (New York, NY), 1996.

(Reteller) Fractured Fairy Tales, Bantam Books (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor) What It Feels Like, Three Rivers Press (New York, NY), 2003.

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2004.

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributes regularly to National Public Radio, as well as to periodicals, including Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, New York, New York Observer, and the New York Times.

SIDELIGHTS:

A.J. Jacobs was born and raised in New York City, then attended Brown University where he studied philosophy. Jacobs serves as a senior editor for Esquire magazine and has also written for a number of magazines and newspapers, including Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, New York, the New York Observer, the New York Times, and the Antioch Daily Ledger. His books are collections of his entertaining nonfiction pieces, and very much in the spirit of the articles he writes both for print publication and for National Public Radio. America Off-line: The Complete Outernet Starter Kit provides a comedic look at Jacobs's take on the Internet in reverse. The book parodies the online craze, poking fun at Web browsers, Internet service providers, and chat rooms by promoting their exact opposite, commonly known as reality. Jenny Donelan, in a review for Byte, remarked that "if you've spent much time on commercial on-line services, you're sure to get a guffaw or two from America Off-line.

With The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, Jacobs took on the ambitious goal of reading, in their entirety, all thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with the idea that, once he was finished, he would know "everything." The project was designed to help Jacobs escape the intellectual rut he felt stuck in following college graduation. He chronicles his experience in his book, summarizing his broadening knowledge in brief, humorous essays. In a review for Booklist, Mark Knoblauch remarked that "plenty of good fun pours out of this prose." Laura Miller, writing for Entertainment Weekly, stated that "what he winds up with by the end of this amiable and funny memoir of the year he spent reading the world's greatest encyclopedia is really just a higher class of jetsam," while Time contributor Joel Stein wrote that "what keeps the book from being no more than a series of alphabetically arranged humor columns is the leitmotif of becoming a man: Jacobs somehow turns the effort of reading thirty-three thousand pages into the world's most passive Bildungsroman." Jamie Watson, in a review for School Library Journal, called the book "a love note to human knowledge and the joys of obtaining it." In an article for Bookseller, Benedicte Page wrote: "The experience of reading the Encyclopaedia has left him, he says, with a very curious mental landscape. ‘Every action during the day sparks a memory of another absurd and useless fact. I'm just looking now at my touch tone phone, and I remember the entry on how the keys were ergonomically designed to create the fastest dialing, which was a nice fact, I thought, that they put some thought into the key arrangement.’" A contributor for Publishers Weekly concluded that "Jacobs's ability to juxtapose his quirky, sardonic wit with oddball trivia make this one of the season's most unusual books."

In The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, Jacobs chronicles the year that he spent attempting to live his life according to biblical scriptures and structures. The plan was to use this as a means of better understanding the lives his forefathers led from a moral and ethical perspective, if not from a strictly physical one. In order to implement his plan, he read through the Bible and kept a running list of every stricture he found over the course of the text. The result was a seventy-two-page list of rules to live by. Understanding that he would not be able to familiarize himself with the entire list as well as implement all of them in one solitary step, Jacobs chose to divide the various rules and add to his adherence each month, gradually building up until he had incorporated as many of these biblical strictures into his life as possible and was able to maintain them. The book itself includes the strictures that Jacobs was able to include in his daily life, with each section spelling out what he is supposed to do and then also including the modern interpretation that Jacobs developed to make the stricture more applicable to the twenty-first century.

Jacobs proves himself creative when it comes to determining how certain verses from the Bible should be carried out. In response to "The Lord is my Shepherd," Jacobs takes a trip to Israel, a journey that enables him to address many of the strictures on his list, though not necessarily in the most obvious manner. Ostensibly, the book is meant to address the literalism that some individuals apply to religion and to illustrate why such an approach is not practical. Reviewers had mixed reactions to Jacobs's effort, with some finding the work humorous overall and an interesting experiment, and others disappointed in the lack of true political applicability given the seriousness of the topic. Other critics felt that Jacobs simply failed to make a valid point and that his subject matter was chosen more as a gimmick than in relationship to any true desire to come to a logical conclusion. A contributor for Kirkus Reviews dubbed Jacobs's effort "a biblical travelogue—and far funnier than your standard King James." Janet Maslin, writing for the New York Times Book Review, commented that "far from creating an overall sense of living by biblical law, this book moves skittishly from topic to topic and generally forgets an idea after Mr. Jacobs has briefly toyed with it. Although he's a very facile writer and even a successfully glib one, he has managed to bring a kind of attention deficit disorder to the theological constructs that are trivialized here." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly concluded that "Jacobs comes across as a generous and thoughtful (and, yes, slightly neurotic) participant observer."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

America's Intelligence Wire, October 28, 2003, "Interview with A.J. Jacobs."

Booklist, September 1, 2004, Mark Knoblauch, review of The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, p. 22.

Bookseller, October 1, 2004, Benedicte Page, "From A-ak to Zywiec: A.J. Jacobs on Why He Read the Whole of the Encyclopedia Britannica," p. 26.

Byte, January, 1997, Jenny Donelan, review of America Off-line: The Complete Outernet Starter Kit, p. 34.

Computer Life, January, 1997, Sean Kelly, review of America Off-line, p. 34.

Entertainment Weekly, November 15, 1996, Megan Harlan, review of America Off-line, p. 66; September 24, 2004, Laura Miller, "Soft-Boiled Egghead: For His Winsome Memoir The Know-It-All A.J. Jacobs Reads the Entire Encyclopedia," p. 111.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2004, review of The Know-It-All, p. 727; July 15, 2007, review of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.

Kliatt, July, 2005, Nola Theiss, review of The Know-It-All, p. 61.

Library Journal, October 1, 2004, Terren Ilanna Wein, review of The Know-It-All, p. 80.

Newsweek, September 27, 2004, "Books: The Guy's a Real Know-It-All," p. 12.

New York Times Book Review, October 18, 2007, Janet Maslin, "Walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Smirk."

People, October 4, 2004, "Dr. Know: Nerds Bow to Your New King," p. 128.

Psychology Today, November-December, 2004, review of The Know-It-All, p. 37.

Publishers Weekly, July 12, 2004, review of The Know-It-All, p. 52; November 8, 2004, "Know-It-All on Tour," p. 18; June 25, 2007, review of The Year of Living Biblically, p. 49.

School Library Journal, February, 2005, Jamie Watson, review of The Know-It-All, p. 158.

Time, October 4, 2004, Joel Stein, "The Know-Everything Party: A.J. Jacobs Turns the Act of Reading the Entire Britannica into a Hilarious, Touching Memoir," p. 78.