The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection (Audio)

by Wendy Northcutt

read by Jason Harris

-Darwin Awards Series, Book 2-

(Roseland: Listen & Live Audio, 2001)

MP3 Audiobook, 298.8 MB, 3.1 Hours, Nonfiction

ISBN: 9781885408761, US$22.95

ABCD Rating: CHECK OUT

From the Cover: An incredible runaway bestseller and cult phenomenon, The Darwin Awards returns with all new tales of trial and awe-inspiring error. More Award Winners, Honorable Mentions, and Urban Legends, together with personal accounts never before heard. Appealing to Darwin fans old and new, The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection audiobook proves that we aren’t done yet—with the ongoing saga of survival of the fittest Homo sapiens.

My Review: After listening to Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island, I decided that I needed a palate cleanser, and Wendy Northcutt’s The Darwin Awards II fit the bill quite nicely. There isn’t much to this book. It is three hours of complete brain popcorn detailing the utter stupidity with which mankind often operates. From walking past a parked police cruiser to rob a gun store full of armed patrons (and an off-duty officer) to throwing stones at passing cars on the highway and causing an out-of-control car to swerve your way, the Darwin Awards has it all (oh, and of course there is the neighbor’s Do-It-Yourself liposuction … with disastrous results).

This book (as well as the others in the series—there’s what, like ninety of them now?) are one of the clearest cases of Schadenfreude that ever there was. You can’t help but chuckle, giggle and laugh out loud at the sheer idiocy (and genius-level ingenuity) of your fellow human beings. And, I will admit, laugh out loud I did (at times) and often while on the bus on my way to work (garnering more than a few sideways glances).

I don’t know that this is the right book for the audio format, though. This seems like the kind of book that you pick up and skip around in, rather than read cover to cover. There is something about the nature of the entries that makes linear progression seem tedious. Add to that fact that I’m not sure I entirely liked reader Jason Harris. Yes, he read the book with the appropriate amount of tongue-firmly-placed-in-cheek, but there was just something about his voice that didn’t work for the overall subject matter (add to that the fact that he attempted to do accents where “appropriate” (which was no where, by the way) and he wasn’t very good at it), and so the whole audio effect was somewhat off-putting.

I was also put off by the fact that a number of the entries in the book have been completely proven false by the Mythbusters. The JATO Car, the Exploding 1812 Overture Trombone, the Frozen Lake Duck Hunters, quite a few of them were debunked on the show. Now … I will accept that my personal chronology here may be to blame. If I remember correctly, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman acknowledge that some of these myths came from Darwin, but still … it took some of the enjoyment out of the listening experience to hear Northcutt assert the veracity of these only to know that the Mythbusters have proven not only could it not happen, but often that it didn’t.

Anyway, the bottom line here is that this is not the book to get on audio. I would recommend it in print as it would facilitate the “hunt-and-peck” method of reading The Darwin Awards II much better than listening does.