Newest book not up to usual standard

A.J. Jacobs, journalist for "Esquire" magazine and contributor to "Mental Floss," has made a career out of being a human guinea pig, inserting himself into extraordinary situations, creating informal sociological experiments and writing about them. In his new book, "The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment," Jacobs chronicles nine mini-experiments he's conducted as a journalist, as a husband, and as a creature of irrational habit.


In his first two books, "The Know-It-All," and "The Year of Living Biblically," Jacobs took on large creative endeavors in hopes to uncover truths about human intelligence and religion, respectively. In his first book, "The Know-It-All," Jacobs read the entire "Encyclopaedia Britannica" and attempted to distinguish between intelligence and wisdom. In his second, "The Year of Living Biblically," he lived by every rule in the Bible, down to every minute detail (including stoning adulterers, which he did, albeit only with tiny pebbles).


While "The Guinea Pig Diaries" is very funny and occasionally insightful, it left me wanting more from Jacobs. Because each chapter contains an experiment completely unrelated to the one before it, they never amount to much more than a fleeting, chuckle-worthy anecdote. "Hey, remember the time I looked like that actor in ‘Shine' and pretended to be him at the 1997 Academy Awards?" It's a funny story, but it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about fame or the nature of celebrity.


It isn't that Jacobs is incapable of something deeper – his "The Year of Living Biblically" was a minor masterpiece of gonzo journalism, and it was hysterical. None of the experiments here seem to take much longer than a month (and, in some cases, an afternoon), and the results are considerably shallower.


"The Guinea Pig Diaries," on its own terms, will probably satisfy the casual reader, but for those familiar with Jacobs' work, it will entertain, but not delight. This is not necessarily a failure of Jacobs as a writer, but of Jacobs as a self-proclaiming guinea pig. If he is going to continue to write about inserting himself into extraordinary situations, he should raise the stakes and do something truly extraordinary.