The Know-It-All by A J Jacobs

Author:A J Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407097336
Publisher: Random House

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names

JULIE AND I have been talking about names for our yet-to-be-conceived child. Julie’s both an unflagging optimist and a planner, so she figures we should get started now. She’s already got a list in her Palm Pilot—Max, Jasper, Kaya, Maya.

Thanks to the Britannica, I’ve got lots of new ideas. Over dinner one night, I decide to test them out.

“I’ve got a good name for the kid,” I tell her.

“Oh yeah?”

“How about Crippled Jacobs?”

“That’s a horrible thing to say,” she says.

“No, it’s just that many cultures use bad names to scare off demons. Crippled Jacobs or Ugly Jacobs—that kind of thing.”

“Uh, no.”

“They’re called apotropaic names.”

No response.

“How about Mshweshwe Jacobs? After the founder of the Sotho nation. He changed his name to Mshweshwe, which is supposed to be the sound a knife makes when shaving.”

I mimed a little shaving. “Mshweshwe.”

“Probably not.”

“What about Odd? O-d-d. Like Odd Hassel, a Norwegian chemist who won the Nobel Prize.”

“Oh, that one I really like,” Julie says. “That one sounds just great.”

Napoleon

Finally, I arrive at the little big man himself. In an odd way, I feel like I know Napoleon already. Dozens of bits and pieces about the French emperor have bobbed up in the previous eighteen thousand pages, giving me an unfinished but compelling portrait. I know, among other things:

•A disgruntled Aaron Burr tried to get Napoleon to conquer Florida.

•Napoleon was a Zionist—or at least “thought of establishing a Jewish state in the ancient lands of Israel.”

•Napoleon loved ice-skating.

•The Napoleonic Wars were so expensive, England started the first income tax to pay for them.

•A French soldier named Nicolas Chauvin showed such simpleminded devotion to Napoleon, he is memorialized in the word “chauvinism.”

•Napoleon used balloons for military reconnaissance, and appointed a man named Nicolas Conté—who also invented the pencil—to be head of the balloon corps.

•Napoleon knew he might want to dump Josephine someday, so when he married her, the crafty emperor made sure there wasn’t a parish priest present at the ceremony. This slight technicality allowed him to dispose of her without a sticky divorce.

•Napoleon commissioned a sculptor named Antonio Canova to make a huge statue of himself in the style of a classical heroic nude. (This one I find particularly surprising. Can you see George W. Bush allowing a statue of himself nude? Clinton, maybe. But most of today’s leaders like their nipples covered.)

•Napoleon’s sister slept with Metternich, the Austrian statesman.

•Napoleon sold the western half of the United States to Jefferson for less than three cents an acre.

It’s a bizarre collection of Napoleon arcana, an admittedly idiosyncratic portrait of the man, but I’m kind of proud of it. I like its randomness. Maybe that says something about me—that I’m overly attracted to the quirks of history. Or maybe it’s because I’m trying to justify the days and days I’ve spent reading the encyclopedia. But in true Napoleonic style, I prefer to see something grander in my grab bag of Bonaparte lore. I prefer to think that it proves just how interwoven history is. Napoleon didn’t just

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