The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection | Date: 08 June 2011, 03:25
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If you liked The Darwin Awards, you will find this book to be another winner.
Like The Darwin Awards, let me note that if you do not find witless death and mutilation humorous, avoid this book. Three of the mutilation examples have a sexual context and are pretty gross.
If you find fatal and grisly mishaps funny, you will enjoy the book greatly. In fact, this has to be the best articulated book ever written about stupid ways to die and lose fertility. Anyone will feel smarter and better about themselves after reading these stories!
This book is about people "removing themselves from the gene pool in sublimely idiotic fashion" in “true accidental blunders.” The incidents involve ways that people “unthinkingly engineer their own downfalls, oblivious to warning signs that the rest of us automatically heed.”
The book's premise is very well framed to put you in a humorous mood. The idea is that when people do stupid things that get them killed or keep them from having children, they thus perform a service by improving the gene pool for the remaining humans. Ms. Northcutt uses many witty essays and quotes to emphasize this point, and establishes the mood well.
She has rules for these awards. To win the Darwin Award, you must (1) die or be unable to procreate after the incident, (2) show “an astounding misapplication of common sense,” (3) cause your own downfall, (4) have the ability to use sound judgment (are not too young or permanently mentally impaired) and (5) have the incident verified by someone else. If you don't meet all these tests, you can still get an honorable mention, or be described as an urban legend or a personal account. I thought these distinctions made good sense, because the story's focus and credibility weighs heavily on the interest it creates for the reader drawn to this subject.
In an improvement over The Darwin Awards, Ms. Northcutt has shared feedback from her readers challenging the veracity of various urban legends, personal accounts, and honorable mentions. As a result, this book is tighter than The Darwin Awards.
In another improvement, the stories much more carefully document the victim’s involvement with illegal drugs and alcohol than in The Darwin Awards. In this way, the cautionary lesson about using these substances is brought home more correctly
The stories are grouped around themes: violating the seven deadly sins, women as the genetically removed party, water misadventures, problems with technology, men acting macho, misadventures with animals, explosions, and criminal capers. There is also a chapter on stories that do not qualify, and a dozen of the all-time favorites of on-line readers...
I rated the book down one star, though, because the average humor level here was not as good as in The Darwin Awards. Almost all of the examples came from 1998-2001, so there were not as many examples to choose from. I also think the verification process needs some further work. In many cases, it is in a publication or broadcast news report (which may have an incentive to "improve" the stories to make them better, and sell more issues). Finally, I think the verified examples are vastly more interesting than the fables. I would like to see a version in the future that is only made up of verified cases. I estimate that less than a quarter of these examples were verified.
I came away with two new themes from reading this book. Guns need to be treated with much more respect. The deaths and dismemberment from guns occur with considerable frequency here. The other theme is that people develop so much self-confidence in their abilities that they decide that the “rules” do not apply to them.
Be cautious, rather than daring, so you can live to enjoy the next book in this humorous, cautionary series!
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