Amazon (AMZN) Publishing’s New York imprint has made its first big acquisition: Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Chef. It’s the third book in a bestselling series by Mr. Ferriss that helps you unlock all the secrets of life by spending four hours reading his books. Other installments include The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich and The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, which The New York Times said “reads as if The New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the SkyMall catalog.”
For those who somehow haven’t heard of him, Mr. Ferriss is a Renaissance man. In addition to writing bestsellers (and presumably having incredible sex, rapid fat-loss and lots of new rich friends), he is also a former national kickboxing champion, a graduate of Princeton and the Guinness World Record holder for the most number of tango spins completed in a minute (37).
Larry Kirshbaum, the publisher of Amazon Publishing, calls The 4-Hour Chef “a watershed work.”
Here are Mr. Ferriss’s other accomplishments (self-proclaimed on his web site):
- Princeton University guest lecturer in High-Tech Entrepreneurship and Electrical Engineering
- Finance and Entrepreneurship advisor at Singularity University at NASA Ames, co-founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil.
- First American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango
- Speaker of 5 languages (6 if he’s reactivating something previously studied)
- National Chinese kickboxing champion
- Horseback archer (yabusame) in Nikko, Japan
- 2009 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute
- Political asylum researcher
- MTV breakdancer in Taiwan
- Hurling competitor in Ireland
- Wired Magazine’s “Greatest Self-Promoter of 2008″
- Actor on hit TV series in mainland China and Hong Kong (“Human Cargo”)
While at Princeton, Mr. Ferriss also “developed his nonfiction writing with Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee.”
