Book Review: That Is All

That Is All
By John Hodgman
Dutton
Publication date: November 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0525952442

Review by Samir Mathur

For this, the third and final installment in his compendium of complete world knowledge, John Hodgman has adopted a new persona – he’s transitioned from a “Professional Writer” to a “Famous Minor Television Personality” and now we find him in his current incarnation, a “Deranged Millionaire,” living in a bunker, preparing for Ragnarok, the (Norse) end of the world.

Obviously.

That Is All picks up where More Information Than You Require left off – literally, as the page numbers and footnotes continue from the end of that book. This time around, Hodgman provides useful and entirely fictional information about, amongst other things, wine (“Chardonnay tastes like Old Coffins”), American football (“a uniquely American combination of rugby and boredom”), and the truth about the Titanic. The sentence “I asked for a mechanical iceberg, but this is ridiculous” made me laugh out loud.

What continues to impress me about Hodgman’s books is not that they are often very funny – though they are. And it’s not that he is able to refer back to his previous work so often and so seamlessly – though he is. What impresses me the most is that he commits to elaborate, insane premises and they work. For instance, when describing the – admittedly demented – scoring rules of tennis, our narrator explains that “you must win the game by a prime number of points or you start all the way back at 15”, and that the loser of a tennis march is called the “Underhills”.

This book feels a little more apocalyptic than the previous two, but that’s because Ragnarok is coming, and so there are sections about how to prepare for the end of the world, things to do before the end of the world, and even some tips on becoming a deranged millionaire.

That Is All is as silly, funny, fake-serious and informative as Hodgman’s other books, and anyone who needs a laugh and some faux-trivia to wow their friends would be well-advised to pick it up... while there’s still time! (Y’know… before the imminent apocalypse.) Run, don’t walk, to your nearest book merchant.