Duh!: The Stupid History of the Human Race
Bob Fenster
Barnes &Noble
Nonfiction, Humorous Nonfiction/Psychology/True Stories
***+
Description
Ah, the great species Homo sapiens. Whether it evolved over millions of years or was placed here intentionally for reasons unknown, the human race has dominated and devastated the planet as no other creature has. We have gone from scrounging up grubs and living in caves to nuking nachos and building skyscrapers, from chipping stones to splitting the atom... but are we really all that bright? Evidently not, to judge by innumerable examples historic and modern. The author uses many stories to show just how smart we aren't, followed by a discussion of our persistent lack of intelligence as a race and some hints on how to make oneself slightly less stupid than one's neighbors.
Review
In the vein of Leland Gregory's Hey Idiot!: Chronicles of Human Stupidity and Wendy Northcut's The Darwin Awards, Fenster reminds people that we have a long, long way to go if we really want to call ourselves the best brains on planet Earth. His many examples make the point abundantly clear, though their brevity sometimes takes them out of context, and more than one sounds like an urban legend with so little information given for corroboration. Fenster also misses the greater stupidity of some tales with his condensations. He mentions, for instance, the disastrous Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1854, and how the crew might have survived if they'd taken sensible items when they abandoned the boats instead of the useless odds and ends found by later searchers. He fails to mention the greater stupidity that likely underlay this bizarre action: the Franklin expedition decided to rely solely on their newfangled canned food and not even pack hunting supplies... which might not have been a problem, had the cans not had lead soldering contaminating the contents, and had they not been trapped for so long in the ice that even that food ran out! (Being trapped for prolonged periods in a dangerous, icy, and almost completely uncharted waterway? Who could've guessed it might happen?) His discussion of why we're a dumb race and how intelligence is apparently not a great survival tactic starts to feel like a comedian hitting the same jokes on the same note over and over again, expecting the same laughs every time. The last section, offering suggestions for breaking oneself out of the rut of laziness and associated stupidity that many of us fall into in the day-to-day course of life, has a little more going for it, and earned it the half-star to put it marginally above Okay.