The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment ~ A.J. Jacobs
For this capsule review, I’m going to utilize “Radical Honesty”, a technique Jacobs tests out for 30 days in the course of his nine “experiments”: Mr. Jacobs, I did not enjoy this book at all. You have a smug, snickering writing style that perhaps is fine for an article in Esquire magazine from time to time (from whence the bulk of this book originated), but is grating and annoying en mass. I don’t care about you as a person, don’t really believe you learned anything from trying to outsource your life to India, learning to only do one task at a time, or doing all of the tasks your wife usually handles. Hopefully your sock puppeting as an attractive woman on a dating site (while utilizing your nanny to go out on the dates) exposed you a little bit to the misogyny and violent sexual hatred women face every day. But it probably didn’t. Mr. Jacobs, you’ve already read the encyclopedia and lived by the Bible for a year, maybe it’s time to give up this stunt writing and leave it to younger, fresher people. For example, The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose, one of your former interns was engaging, interesting to read, and never truly ridiculed its subjects (students of Liberty University). Roose respected his “subjects” (so to speak), you do not. In closing sir, you are an asshole.
