Father Knows Less!

I don’t know which is more entertaining: the deceptively simple questions that these kids ask, or the hilarious informative answer that Wendell Jamieson has dug up. Either way, Father Knows Less is a tremendously fun book. And after reading it I am (slightly) less terrified to face my son’s questions about ear wax, baby pigeons, and life in general. A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author The Know-It-All Children ask questions, that’s a fact. We parents do our best to answer. But what do we do when we don’t know the answers? Or if we’d like to know the answers ourselves? My son Dean asks and asks “What would hurt more, getting run over by a car or getting stung by a jellyfish?” “What happens when your plane flies over a volcano?” “Am I allergic to metal?” So I set out to get him answers from adults who actually lived them, like the jet pilot who flew through a plume of volcanic ash and watched as all of his engines shut down. And as I did, something incredible happened: the voices of all these adults from around the world, answering the questions of children, took me back to my own childhood and reminded me of the questions I’d asked my parents, and why. “Father Knows Less” is the story of my quest to get answers, and the memo