An immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depression -- and employed some of the biggest names in American letters. The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious -- and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then...

"Part memoir and part education (or lack thereof), The Know-It-All chronicles NPR contributor A.J. Jacobs's hilarious, enlightening, and seemingly impossible quest to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z. To fill the ever-widening gaps in his Ivy League education, A.J. Jacobs sets for himself the daunting task of reading all thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His wife, Julie, tells him it's a waste of time, his friends believe...

Examines the social, political, and popular culture of America in the period between VJ Day and the start of the Korean War, discussing the country's anxieties and insecurities at the onset of the Red Scare and the Cold War.