AUDIOBOOK
About
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A witty, charming, and engaging dive into trivia's colorful history, from America's highest-earning game show contestant of all time and host of Jeopardy!
"Insightful, informative, and written with a strong dose of humor and humility. . . . I loved this book."-Will Shortz, crossword editor, The New York Times
Ken Jennings is trivia's undisputed king-and as he traces his rise from anonymous computer programmer to nerd folk icon, he explores his newly conquered kingdom: the world of trivia itself.
Trivia, he has found, is centuries older than his childhood obsession with it. Whisking us from the coffeehouses of seventeenth-century London to the Internet age, Jennings chronicles the ups and downs of the trivia fad: the quiz book explosion of the Jazz Age; the rise, fall, and rise again of TV quiz shows; the nostalgic campus trivia of the 1960s; and the 1980s, when Trivial Pursuit® again made it fashionable to be a know-it-all.
Jennings also investigates the shadowy demimonde of today's trivia subculture, guiding us on a tour of trivia across America. He goes head-to-head with the blowhards and diehards of the college quiz-bowl circuit, the slightly soused faithful of the Boston pub trivia scene, and the raucous participants in the annual Q&A marathon in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, "The World's Largest Trivia Contest." And, of course, he takes us behind the scenes of his improbable 75-game run on Jeopardy!
But above all, Brainiac is a love letter to the useless fact. (Who knew that there's a crater on Venus named after Laura Ingalls Wilder? Ken Jennings, that's who.) Engaging and erudite, Brainiac is an irresistible celebration of nostalgia, curiosity, and geeky obsession-in a word, trivia. What is Ambition?
Here's some trivia for you. The red rock country of southern Utah is red for the same reason that the planet Mars has a pinkish tinge when you see it in the night sky: both are loaded with iron oxide, a.k.a. ordinary household rust. The shadows of these red desert crags are lengthening toward our car as it pulls into a dusty gas station on the Utah-Arizona border. The air smells of diesel fumes and sagebrush when I open the passenger-side door. My friend Earl Cahill unfolds himself from the driver's seat, relieved we've made it to this, our last chance at gas for fifty miles.
Earl is my old college roommate, and though he's a remarkable six-foot-nine in height, he's one of those giants who hope that by holding their head and shoulders at just the right dejected angle, they may somehow-if not disappear completely-at least give the appearance of being only six-foot-four or six-foot-five. He blinks into the setting sun through the shock of floppy brown hair hanging over his face, a face that bears the perpetually disappointed look of an English foxhound or a Cubs fan.
As I pump gas, we re-enact the ritual of all road-trippers since the days of Jack Kerouac, and try to figure out how we're going to divvy up the trip's costs. Unlike our beatnik freeway forefathers, however, Earl and I are both computer programmers, and we're driving down to Los Angeles not to hear jazz or harvest lettuce or watch the sun set over the Pacific, but to try to land spots on Jeopardy!, America's most popular and most difficult quiz show. Appropriately, geekily, we are squabbling about the most elegant algorithm to calculate and divide up our expenses.
"How about this?" I offer. "There's two of us, so that vastly improves our chances that one of us will make it on the show, right? And, as we know, that person is guaranteed at least a thousand dollars, even if he finishes in third place. So here's what we do: we split all expenses when we get back, but if one of us makes it on the show, that person pays for the other's share of gas and other expenses from this trip."
Earl's brow furrows, suspicious he's being conned.
"It's no-lose," I persist. "If you get
"Insightful, informative, and written with a strong dose of humor and humility. . . . I loved this book."-Will Shortz, crossword editor, The New York Times
Ken Jennings is trivia's undisputed king-and as he traces his rise from anonymous computer programmer to nerd folk icon, he explores his newly conquered kingdom: the world of trivia itself.
Trivia, he has found, is centuries older than his childhood obsession with it. Whisking us from the coffeehouses of seventeenth-century London to the Internet age, Jennings chronicles the ups and downs of the trivia fad: the quiz book explosion of the Jazz Age; the rise, fall, and rise again of TV quiz shows; the nostalgic campus trivia of the 1960s; and the 1980s, when Trivial Pursuit® again made it fashionable to be a know-it-all.
Jennings also investigates the shadowy demimonde of today's trivia subculture, guiding us on a tour of trivia across America. He goes head-to-head with the blowhards and diehards of the college quiz-bowl circuit, the slightly soused faithful of the Boston pub trivia scene, and the raucous participants in the annual Q&A marathon in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, "The World's Largest Trivia Contest." And, of course, he takes us behind the scenes of his improbable 75-game run on Jeopardy!
But above all, Brainiac is a love letter to the useless fact. (Who knew that there's a crater on Venus named after Laura Ingalls Wilder? Ken Jennings, that's who.) Engaging and erudite, Brainiac is an irresistible celebration of nostalgia, curiosity, and geeky obsession-in a word, trivia. What is Ambition?
Here's some trivia for you. The red rock country of southern Utah is red for the same reason that the planet Mars has a pinkish tinge when you see it in the night sky: both are loaded with iron oxide, a.k.a. ordinary household rust. The shadows of these red desert crags are lengthening toward our car as it pulls into a dusty gas station on the Utah-Arizona border. The air smells of diesel fumes and sagebrush when I open the passenger-side door. My friend Earl Cahill unfolds himself from the driver's seat, relieved we've made it to this, our last chance at gas for fifty miles.
Earl is my old college roommate, and though he's a remarkable six-foot-nine in height, he's one of those giants who hope that by holding their head and shoulders at just the right dejected angle, they may somehow-if not disappear completely-at least give the appearance of being only six-foot-four or six-foot-five. He blinks into the setting sun through the shock of floppy brown hair hanging over his face, a face that bears the perpetually disappointed look of an English foxhound or a Cubs fan.
As I pump gas, we re-enact the ritual of all road-trippers since the days of Jack Kerouac, and try to figure out how we're going to divvy up the trip's costs. Unlike our beatnik freeway forefathers, however, Earl and I are both computer programmers, and we're driving down to Los Angeles not to hear jazz or harvest lettuce or watch the sun set over the Pacific, but to try to land spots on Jeopardy!, America's most popular and most difficult quiz show. Appropriately, geekily, we are squabbling about the most elegant algorithm to calculate and divide up our expenses.
"How about this?" I offer. "There's two of us, so that vastly improves our chances that one of us will make it on the show, right? And, as we know, that person is guaranteed at least a thousand dollars, even if he finishes in third place. So here's what we do: we split all expenses when we get back, but if one of us makes it on the show, that person pays for the other's share of gas and other expenses from this trip."
Earl's brow furrows, suspicious he's being conned.
"It's no-lose," I persist. "If you get