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The Darwin Awards : Evolution In Action

The Darwin Awards : Evolution In Action

List Price: $16.95
Your Price: $16.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: dark humor but gives you stories to talk about at parties
Review: At first I thought this book was going to be very funny. Or at least give me stories to share with my friends. The book even warns in the beginning not to read it like a regular book but rather to read a story here and there. So at first it was interesting to see how people do stupid things but after a while it got dark and depressing because everyone in the book must die of their stupidity to be eligiable for the book. The book was good in the way that it verified all stories so you know they are true. But this book is not for the faint at heart. This book would be great for that family member that we all have who has that dark cynical quirky sense of humor. Well I hope we all have one and I am not the only one who has one lol. It did give me some stories to tell at parties and social occasions.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Documented Gallows Humor
Review: Before describing this book, let me just say that if you do not find death and mutilation humorous, avoid this book.

If you find fatal mishaps funny, you will enjoy the book greatly. In fact, this has to be the best 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 "celebrating self-removal of incompetent genetic material for the human race." In essence, the book proves that "common sense is not so common."

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 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, (2) show really bad judgment, (3) cause your own downfall, (4) have the ability to use sound judgment (are not 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.

The stories are grouped around themes: comeuppances with animals, problems with relatives, criminal misadventures, problems with fire and explosives, fatal falls, military goofs, macho errors, unsafe sex, watery deaths, and genital-related stories. Some stories could have fit into four or more categories, so it must have been a challenge to fit everything into a group.

Here are a few of my favorite stories:

The couple who crashed their car driving at 80 miles an hour while having sex totally nude at the same time.

The chicken that fell down a well and was saved after six people drowned in the process.

The man who crushed out his cigarette in a pail of explosives, blowing them and him up.

The ex-firefighter arsonist who died while starting the fire that was designed to make him a hero so he could get his old job back.

The couple who left their car and went for a stroll amidst the tigers in an wild animal park, and served as tiger meat.

The man who threw his wife out the window where she stuck in some wires. He then jumped after her, missed the wires, and died. She was saved.

Three guys to stole a large pig, and strapped it in their truck. The pig's thrashing caused the truck to crash, and the three men died because they hadn't attached their own seat belts. The pig survived.

The man found nude, dead of hypothermia, in a killer whale pool at an amusement park.

The thief who had tilted a Coke machine to shake a free bottle out, and was crushed when the machine fell on him.

The woman who died of hypothermia and dehydration in a tent after starting a 21 day spiritual cleansing diet intended to free her from needing to eat food or drink liquids. She would get all of her nutrition from the atmosphere instead. You start with no food or water for 7 days, then go 14 days with only sips of water, then take nothing. Hmmm.

I rated the book down one star, though, because a lot of the seeming stupidity was probably related to partial accidents in stupid circumstances rather than complete intention. I found many of the stories possibly mischaracterized in this way. For example, one story has a man using electric current to kill fish. He then ends up in the pond (described as going in to get the fish) and dies from the current. Now, you can read that as not realizing that electric current could kill him, or you can read that as he accidentally fell overboard before turning the current off. Now, in either case, I don't recommend this as a way to fish, but the story doesn't ring true as the "funny" story it is portrayed to be.

I also suspect that a lot of these stories have an unreported connection to alcohol or substance abuse. The verification in many cases is after the fact or is in a publication (which may have an incentive to "improve" the stories to make them better, and sell more issues), which probably adds to the tendency for "stupidity" bias in the interpretations.

After you finish having a good laugh, I suggest that you consider how you may put yourself into a dangerous situation that could make you a candidate for this award. For example, do you ever drive or pilot a plane while under the influence? Do you ever go near open windows in high places when you are unsteady?

I suspect that most of us have some foolishness that we need to eliminate if we want to avoid these awards. In my case, I think I need to be more careful when using equipment. I tend to go the fast route, rather than the safest one. I'm going to slow down and be safer in the future.

May all of your "hang man" experiences be on paper!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Funny at times
Review: Charles Darwin's theory of the "survival of the fittest" implies, by extension, that idiots will die, thus the premise of this humorous volume. Wendy Northcutt has compiled a series of anecdotes of fatal stupidity, from the drunken pilot who took off with a gust lock in place to the prison guard falling through a skylight as he "supervised" conjugal visits. Many of these stories involve alcohol, which is not so much stupidity as it impairment. The story of a man awakened in the middle of the night by a phone and mistaking his bedside gun for a receiver speaks less of a lack of intelligence than it does nighttime confusion. Other anecdotes are truly hilarious in their lack of common sense.

A person must die to be awarded a Darwin Award, so these stories aren't for the fainthearted. They have all been carefully documented to avoid inclusions of urban legends. Unfortunately, as a whole, the book is simply not as funny as the individual stories I used to receive in my inbox. Too many borderline anecdotes are included. Although this book makes a good gift for those who revel in the stupidity of others, don't expect laughs on every page.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: This is either hilarious or sickening.
Review: For those that enjoy macabre humor and find strange-but-true stories interesting, this book is indispensible. Otherwise, it depends upon whether you find the death of the fish farmer who harvests his fish by running electric current through his man-made pond, then wades into said pond before shutting off the current, or the energy plant employee who uses an coal furnace's conveyor as an exercise treadmill, as humouous or disgusting.

One criticism: A sentence on the inside of the dust jacket mentions a story of a terrorist who opens, and detonates, his own mail bomb, after it was returned to him for insufficient postage. Although this story has been circulating the internet for some time (enter "Khay Rahmajet," the guy's name, on a search engine), it appears nowhere else in the book.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Darwin's Theories in Practice
Review: Human beings are mostly advanced and intelligent creatures when compared to other living things. But the actions of some are so incredibly mindless that they boggle the imagination. With some people, the supreme acts of stupidity they have committed has either led to their demise or to the inability to spread their tainted cells to future generations via reproduction. Those who have succumbed to stupidity in this manner are proud recipients of a Darwin Award, named after Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution and natural selection.

This book divides it winning entries into those that have been confirmed, those that are honorable mentions, and those that have been proven to be urban legends. Confirmed entries have been verified as true. Honorable mentions are given to individuals who committed gross acts of stupidity but didn't actually die or lose the ability to reproduce. .And urban legends are those stories which are known to be false but have been included in this book anyway because so many people believe them to be true.

The humor used in this guide is a little bit on the morbid side, and this fact could turn some readers off. The book talks about these people and the things they did and, in many cases, it seems to be making fun of the incident, even when people died as a result. It is all meant in good fun, but it could be objectionable to more sensitive readers.

As far as the stories themselves go, I found that many of them are quite humorous, particularly those that involve a man's private parts. It's shocking to read some of the outrageous things than men will do in order to get off. Some can be chalked up as lapses in judgment, but others are so weird they defy any sense of rationalization. (...)
A book like this may not be to everyone's liking, both for its callous sense of humor and for the briefness of many of the entries. No story is more than two pages long and some are only a single paragraph. This isn't always enough to adequately describe an event thoroughly. Still, this book is a pretty good one, filled with plenty of funny incidents of natural selection taking place, adding proof to Darwin's theory that less intelligent members of society are gradually eliminated from the gene pool each and every day.


Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Stupid deaths or stupid reading???
Review: Let me start by saying that I love black humor. If not, I would not had purchase this book. So it is not a matter of being "tenderheart" or "without sense of humor". The thing is that this book is simply not funny.

I used to read the Darwin Awards e-mails until I noticed the abundance of urban legends and that once an award "honored" an eight years child that died in an accident.

Browsing the book in a bookstore, I found that these two flaws were attended: 1) Urban legends were identified as such 2) Children are no longer elegible, as "stupidity" and "ignorance" are two complete different attributes.

Well, I purchased the book, and now I am sorry. Here are some of the weak points:

1) Many of the stories does not qualify as "Darwin Awards", but just stories of plain stupidity (like a burglar that selected a team of olimpics runner as victim)

2) In some stories innocent people die, and still that is supposed to be funny. It will be like laughing of somebody who died while drunk-driving, even if he killed innocent people.

3) Too many stories are "urban legends", dubious "personnel accounts" and "honorable mentions" (just tales of stupidity and close calls with death). By example, of the first 60 stories, 26 fall into these categories.

4) The stories are funny when there is some poetic justice, as in the case of macho behaviors (like the guy who opposed to treat a cobra bite because he can take it "like a man") or people who think that they are smarter than the rest (the guy who electrocuted the fishes in the river, and then proceeded to collect the fishes without removing the electrical cables). These stories are the exception. Most of them are simply momentary bad judgement.

However, I enjoyed the author's description of the evolution theory, the educative notes added to some of the stories, and information regarding the controversies arised by some of the stories.

If you have read the other reviews, you will notice readers are strongly divided regarding this book. This is obviously a matter of tastes. I suggest you visit their official site before you make a decision.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: People are stupid. I don't need a book to tell me
Review: OK, hearing about one of the Darwin Award winners can be funny.
But there's only so much stupidity I can take at once.
My biggest problem with the book was that the WRITING wasn't funny. Too "just the facts" oriented to be entertaining.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: People are stupid. I don't need a book to tell me
Review: OK, hearing about one of the Darwin Award winners can be funny.
But there's only so much stupidity I can take at once.
My biggest problem with the book was that the WRITING wasn't funny. Too "just the facts" oriented to be entertaining.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Akin to eating a dozen glazed doughnuts in a single sitting
Review: Reading the "The Darwin Awards" is akin to eating a dozen glazed doughnuts in a single sitting. It's hard to get full and you know you that you really shouldn't finish the whole dozen. But you do. (The author uses an analogy with jellybeans, but I don't care for sugar in that density.)

The author, Wendy Northcutt, recognized this pitfall, and even stated "These stories aren't meant to be read all at once." But putting this collection of tales on the table top proves harder than expected. . .just one more, you think, then another, and well, you see how it goes.

Ms. Northcutt prefaces this collection of tales-some true and verified; some unverified submissions; some personal accounts; and, for fun, some relevant urban legend-with a synopsis of Darwin's somehow still controversial "theory" of evolution (when will we collectively abandon the notion that evolution is a theory; how the Internet shaped her work in collecting and verifying submissions for the Darwin Awards; and the criteria for determining the winners of this dubious honor.

Some may consider Ms. Northcutt's rather biting humor mean-spirited and cruel. Others find great humor at these mostly fatal tales marked chiefly by stupidity---those a measure of these doomed souls no doubt were ignorant of the potentially lethal consequences of their actions.

Regardless, "The Darwin Awards" might find a home in a beach house, on a book case in the basement, or even a treehouse. It doesn't merit shelf space with the literature lining the living room bookcase.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The story of the Idiotics
Review: The Darwin Award is an incredible read. This book is a non-fiction book. It has tons of different stories that are hilarious and interesting. Since they are so funny you always want to know what the next story is going to be.
I think that Wendy Northcutt did a good job because she took in all the information and put it in categories with other stories that are similar to it. All the characters are similar because they all have died doing something stupid. For and example Like one of the stories is about two guys who get drunk on July 4 and were hungry and went to a pig farm and stole a 400 pound pig. But when they got the pig in the back of the truck it went crazy and the truck went rolling 40 feet and the two guys died. That is just one of the stories and there are many more.
The rating I would give this book is very good. I would recommend this to anybody who likes books that are very funny. It is also not very long at all. So if you want a very good read , read this.
Brett Beeler



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