My Life as an Experiment

With this book, A. J. Jacobs became my favorite working author and I his adoring fan. Jacobs has by this point written three books and this is the third I've read. In fact, I enjoy his writing so much that, though a skinflint in other departments, I find myself unable to wait the year and a half or so before his books become paperbacks and will now simply purchase them in hardback as soon as I can, as I did for this one. This book is not really so much an experiment as it is a collection of his pieces for "Esquire" which were self-experimental in nature. To wit: 1. "My Life as a Beautiful Woman" Jacobs masquerades online as his hot-to-trot nanny (with her permission). 2. "My Outsourced Life" Jacobs attempts to have low-paid Indians take care of as much of his family and work chores as possible. 3. "I Think You're Fat" Jacobs tries out a watered-down version of Brad Blanton's "Radical Honesty" program, whereby you simply tell everybody exactly what you're thinking and answer every question put to you as honestly as you can. 4. "240 Minutes of Fame" Jacobs, who looks eerily like Noah Taylor, pretends to be him at the Oscars - with his permission. 5. "The Rationality Project" Jacobs does what he can to make his mind and habits strictly rational and avoid cognitive biases. 6. "The Truth About Nakedness" Jacobs is maneuvered into posing nude in "Esquire." 7. "What Would George Washington Do?" Jacobs attempts to live his life by George Washington's famous 110 rules for decent behavior. 8. "The Unitasker" Jacobs attempts to do or experience one thing at a time, studiously avoiding the multitasking plague that has begun to affect all of us. 9. "Whipped" Jacobs attempts to do everything his wife tells him to do (or requests) for a month. Basically what you're looking at here is something I've wanted to get my hands on for a while: a collection of Jacobs's pieces from "Esquire," although not exactly as they were printed therein. The author has tinkered around with them a bit and added short retrospective reflections on each one. Essentially, then, there's not much in this book that's "new." Nevertheless, this saved me the trouble of having to comb through Esquire's archives. Always fresh and engaging, never boring for a second, Jacob's writing here is laugh-out-loud funny, but even the one piece that wasn't, "The Rationality Project," held some deep lessons for life that really got you thinking. Jacobs says of that particular project that "not counting my year of living biblically, the Rationality Project has had the most dramatic, long-lasting effect of all my experiments." For my part, that essay failed to bring so much as a smile to my face, but that was the only chapter I made a point of carefully re-reading once I finished with the book.

To be a great author, it is said that you need to have a brutal childhood so that you have something interesting to write about. A.J. Jacobs finally admits, in this his third book, that he lead a perfectly happy childhood. Therefore, in order to find something captivating to comment upon he experiments on himself and logs the results. This technique and lifestyle certainly provides Jacobs quite a large amount of fodder for his witty introspective musings. He has made himself into a great author through hard work and extraordinary self-imposed experiences. Jacobs' writings come naturally, and are fun and easy to read -- much in the same stylings as Bill Bryson (another of my favorite commentators on the funny side of "real" life). I look forward to further reflections on A.J.'s experimental life, and I'm eager to hear what his next book will be about. Will it be about living a month each as 12 different ethnicities, personalities, species, astrological signs, religions, occupations, etc? His "walk in another man's shoes" experiments are always insightful and compelling, and I'm sure whatever he chooses will be well worth the year-long wait!

I've read A.J.'s other books, and like those, I found that this book was as informative as it was entertaining. This is an endearing formula, and one which works well for A.J. In this book he takes away some important life lessions that I think will make a lasting impact on him, and I truly hope that some of those lessions will stick with me as well. I especially enjoyed his anti-multitasking chapter because I think most of us today could use a lession on learning the art focusing, and not be distracted by the many personal electronic devices which beg for our attention. I had always suspected that multitasking is not especially efficient, if not outright detrimental, and it was nice to read some proof of this. I was enlightened by the George Washington chapter. GW was truly a great man, one that history has distorted somewhat, but overall he did live up to his fantastic reputation. Oddly, he started out as a bit of a jerk, so there is hope for all of us. Many of the rules he zealously applied to his behavoir can and should be followed to this day. I can't wait for the next book by A.J.

A.J. Jacobs is the thinking person's Walter Mitty. Except instead of physically demanding challenges --- with perhaps one exception --- he deals in the cerebral. The editor-at-large for Esquire, who lived the examined life in THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY and read every entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica in THE KNOW-IT-ALL, collects several shorter but similarly thought-provoking pieces in THE GUINEA PIG DIARIES, where he seems too humble even to refer to himself in that regard. Who among us hasn't wished to just dump all the minutia of everyday life into someone else's lap? Jacobs accomplishes this in his essay, "My Outsourced Life," starting off with little things, like shopping, and escalating to conducting arguments with his long-suffering wife, Julie, who deserves major props for putting up with all of these schemes. (By the way, she finally gets a measure of recompense as hubby caters to her every wish for a month in "Whipped.") Some of Jacobs's experiments border on the dangerous, as when he resolves to spend a month being radically honest ("I Think You're Fat") or pretends to be a movie personality, crashing the Oscar Awards ("240 Minutes of Fame"). While published under the general category of humor, THE GUINEA PIG DIARIES could also be considered a philosophical treatise. In "The Rationality Project," Jacobs channels Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner of FREAKONOMICS fame when he deconstructs several behavioral theories to prove their irrationalities. Some of the pieces seem to contradict each other. The book leads off with Jacobs masquerading as a beautiful woman as he attempts to play an online Cyrano for the family's lovely nanny. For all the anecdotes he includes regarding this well-intentioned gesture, one can imagine the creepy stuff that didn't make it into print. In another essay, the tables are turned as Jacobs becomes objectified as a condition for an article and photo shoot of "Weeds" star Mary-Louise Parker ("The Truth About Nakedness"). Both of these seem to go against his attempt to follow the tenets of our nation's first president ("What Would George Washington Do?"). Although he doesn't actually follow said behavior as he did in THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY, it's an interesting look at the mores of a more genteel period; there's something to be said about the dignity and formality with which our foreparents comported themselves. Perhaps the most difficult of the projects was the concentration required to do just one thing at a time, to totally immerse oneself in the here and now ("The Unitasker"). Can anyone these days but the most devoted yogi actually focus to that extent? Not me; as I write this I'm checking my email, listening to music and drinking my coffee, with the U.S. Open on in the background. One wonders how long Jacobs maintained some of these behaviors after completing the assignments. He has said there are some habits he acquired during his BIBLICALLY period that he tries to maintain. Does he st

In the familiar style that he perfected in "The Know It All" and "The Year of Living Biblically", Jacobs takes us through his life as a series of "experiments", from outsourcing to India such daily routines as reading bedtime stories to his young children to trying to live according to the 110 "Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour" that George Washington formulated for himself as a young man. In the chapter "The Truth About Nakedness" Jacobs shares with us the full range of emotions he experienced while posing nude for a photo shoot for Esquire Magazine (his employer) in order to induce Mary Louise Parker to similarly pose (the book includes only a photo of the writer). And his effort to become a disciplined "unitasker" by (among other matters) reciting out loud (seemingly to himself) his shopping list while in the supermarket, and the reactions of bystanding shoppers, was among the many moments of droll humor in the book. Perhaps my personal favorite of the Jacobs experiments was "The Rationality Project", his effort to identify as rationally as possible, the "right" toothpaste from among the 40 or so on the shelf. To do so, Jacobs explains the need to remove from the decision making process the "Halo effect", the "Availability Fallacy", "Confirmation Bias", the "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy" and other of the "irrational biases and Darwinian anachronisms" that influence all of us in making the most mundane of our choices. And once again it is his wife Julie who, in her long-suffering style, provides the necessary dose of reality to bring his over-the-top eccentricities back down to earth. Fans of A. J. Jacobs will once again be amply rewarded.