34-year-old James Holzhauer has made $1.4M (and counting) on “Jeopardy!” What’s his secret? Kids’ books, for one thing. As Holzhauer told the New York Times, “I have a strategy of reading children’s books to gain knowledge.” In a follow-up interview with Publishers Weekly, he explained how he’d get sneaky—putting library books on hold and picking them up directly from the circulation desk since the libraries he visited didn’t allow adults in the Kids Department without, you know, a kid tagging along.
If you’re looking to gain a lot of knowledge in a straightforward way like James Holzhauer did, you’re in luck! Books-A-Million has just the thing, and we won’t even make you drag any kids along with you.
Here’s a selection of great books with everything you need to know (and nothing you don’t) to get you started. And when you make it big as a game show phenomenon, we just hope you’ll remember us from before you became rich and famous.
Everything You Need to Ace Science takes readers from scientific investigation and the engineering design process to the Periodic Table; forces and motion; forms of energy; outer space and the solar system; to earth sciences, biology, body systems, ecology, and more.
Everything You Need to Ace Math covers everything to get a student over any math hump: fractions, decimals, and how to multiply and divide them; ratios, proportions, and percentages; geometry; statistics and probability; expressions and equations; and the coordinate plane and functions.
Everything You Need to Ace English Language Arts takes students from grammar to reading comprehension to writing with ease, including parts of speech, active and passive verbs, Greek and Latin roots and affixes; nuances in word meanings; textual analysis, authorship, structure, and other skills for reading fiction and nonfiction; and writing arguments, informative texts, and narratives.
Everything You Need to Ace American History covers Native Americans to the war in Iraq. There are units on Colonial America; the Revolutionary War and the founding of a new nation; Jefferson and the expansion west; the Civil War and Reconstruction; and all of the notable events of the 20th century–World Wars, the Depression, the Civil Rights movement, and much more.
Everything You Need to Ace World History kicks off with the Paleolithic Era and transports the reader to ancient civilizations–from Africa and beyond; the middle ages across the world; the Renaissance; the age of exploration and colonialism, revolutions, and the modern world and the wars and movements that shaped it.
