Book Review – Darwin Awards by Wendy Northcutt

A Collection of the Most Bizarre and Stupid Deaths Known to Humanity

May 16, 2009

A focus on the macabre and ridiculous propel these stories of "how the gene pool got better" - some documented and some pure urban legend.

Some may remember the Darwin Awards from years ago, around the original increase in popularity of the internet. There was the guy who answered his gun instead of his phone in the middle of the night and shot himself in the head. The guy who tried to fix his car while his buddy was driving it. The guy who tipped a coke machine over onto himself when trying to fish a free one out. There was a whole series of these short little blurbs that came off not necessarily as journalistic but more as passing conversation pieces and water cooler chatpoints.

The other end of the delivery was the longer, more detailed type of story where guys end up in odd situations made up of any two or three of the following: castrated, anally penetrated, bleeding, naked, stacked on top of one another, hanging from a roof/tree, under a pile of something, and/or burnt into sterility. Both the short form and the long form of these articles can be found in Wendy Northcutt’s Darwin Awards: Evolution In Action (Plume, ISBN: 0452283442, 2002), and both can be very effective, as they take to the memory with either their brevity or their detail.

Uneven and Occasionally Poorly Told, but Successful Regardless

Despite the effectiveness of many of these stories, a large portion of them are hindered by pace and length moreso than content, which is already laid out. Many of these middle-field stories fail to hit their mark all the time, regardless of the material. In fact, sometimes the stories succeed almost in spite of themselves.

Similar to reading a rockstar autobiography (David Lee Roth’s Crazy from the Heat comes to mind), even the most insufficient writing isn’t bad enough to mess up some of the tales being told. A lot of these award winning stories are the same way, and it’d be surprising to hear someone fumble the telling of a guy who dies while hooking a car battery up to a cow’s heart and electrocuting his penis.

The Writer and the Winners

The woman who compiled the collection, Wendy Northcutt, has a degree in molecular biology and, at the writing of the book, was off-and-on working on her masters. It’s obvious that the type of writing she was most used to doing, lab reports and the such, shaped her own style of writing into the way it was when writing the blurbs for the book, and other than the corny jokes and unnecessary exclamation points, she give a mostly enjoyable read.

Though a reader may doubt some of the winners or feel that it is wrong to mock the death of another human, it can almost unanimously be agreed upon that the majority of these deaths were caused by sheer stupidity.

However, slipping and falling into a manure spreader sounds more accidental than stupid, as anyone familiar with farming could tell. A 67 year old woman getting knocked over a cliff by a herd of sheep may be morbid slapstick, but it certainly doesn’t make the woman an idiot. Selections like this seem somewhat cruel when placed in a collection that claims the world is better off without the deceased in question.

The Grotesque

A lot of these stories operate on shock value, but anyone who’s worked in meat processing or a veterinary field or surgery would most likely be desensitized to the blood and guts found in this anthology. Those groups are in the minority, however, and this book would do the trick for anyone looking to be mildly-offended with typically disgusting stuff.

The first chapter, on animal related incidents, is pretty lame and overly predictable (as is, to a certain degree, the chapter on criminals), but the chapters on manly men and penis injuries are chock full of the grotesque elements that people picked up the book for in the first place. (There are women in the book, but mostly the guys are being fatally dumb)

A Nice, Mindless Read

The truly great stories are scattered throughout, and if a reader has a spare hour or two, this makes for a nice, mindless read. Or, if the invokes bravery, the evolutionary questions that these stories pose could be considered in regards to what they represent about the changes the human race has gone and will go through. Either way, there’s something that must be said about a man putting six staples into his scrotum.

The copyright of the article Book Review – Darwin Awards by Wendy Northcutt in Humorous Writing/Books is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish Book Review – Darwin Awards by Wendy Northcutt in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.