Have you ever wondered what it would be like to outsource your entire life to India? I mean EVERYTHING!

Well wonder no longer, as this book presents this scenario, and others both more and less useful.

It really did leave me wondering: If this guy can make big bucks doing this stuff and writing about it, why can't I?

Then I realized my wife would kill me if I did, and decided to leave it to the professionals. In the meantime, I have enjoyed living vicariously through the author, and would suggest you read about his exploits as well.

Having read and loved Jacobs previous two books, The Know It All and The Year of Living Biblically, I was excited to see he had written a new book.
However, his two earlier experiments each took a year whereas the experiments in this book took roughly a month each. None of them were very in depth due to being done so quickly. This would probably be a great book for anyone with ADD.

What really annoyed me though was that a great deal of this book was made up of stories published in his first two books. I couldn't help but feel like I'd paid for the same thing twice. In fact if I hadn't gotten 40% off of this book when I bought it I would probably be writing a really nasty review right now, as well as an email to Jacobs himself.

With his latest title, author A.J. Jacobs, already famous for performing social "experiments" on himself, decided to focus on several smaller projects rather than one larger one (such as reading the encyclopedia). These experiments include suce things as living by George Washington's Rules of Civility and spending an entire month catering to his wife's every whim (probably the highlight of the book.)

Jacobs certainly made the right decision to not write an entire book about these topics but some of them aren't really worthy of being done at all. Living by Washington's rules can really be summed up with "being polite to everyone plus bowing".

I still enjoy Jacobs sense of humor and enjoy hearing tales about his long suffering wife (who gets to contribute to this title) but this book doesn't quite rise to the level of his previous efforts.

Books rarely make me laugh. I might smile or grin and share a story but i rarely laugh out loud. I did with this book. I did not read either of his previous two books so i have nothing to compare it with. i did not pick this book up with the intention of learning anything like perhaps one might with his previous one. i was only looking to be entertained.
In the same genre as perhaps Freakanomics, Blink or Outliers where the reader gets a very high level view of various concepts this book does the same but with a much funnier perspective.