If you read a story a day in Wendy Northcutt’s THE DARWIN AWARDS 4: INTELLIGENT DESIGN, you could treat it as a handy lesson plan for survival. For instance, you would learn:

• Live eels placed in the rectum are not an effective cure against constipation;
• Fumigating your house by filling it with natural gas is not recommended;
• One should not take the phrase “you need bigger balls” too literally; and
• Stabbing yourself repeatedly in order to place the blame on a neighbor will cause you to most likely win a Darwin Award.

We’ve all heard of the Darwin Awards, having seen the “honorees” endlessly forwarded into our e-mail boxes, and laughed guiltily at the demise of some poor unfortunate person. Well, now they’re in book form! Actually, the books have been around for a while; this is the fourth installment, written by Wendy Northcutt with Christopher M. Kelly. The subtitle isn’t all that important; in fact, it seems to be more of a distraction than anything else.

What we’re here for is silly (but true) stories about silly people either killing themselves or rendering themselves procreatively inactive in stupid ways, and this book provides plenty. Northcutt explains what makes for a good Darwin Award as there are some fairly significant parameters, but the rest of the book is an odd bag of structure. The stories are broken out into different categories: Vehicles, Water, Women, Animals, Alcohol, Explosion/Fire, Weapons and Miscellaneous, each headed by a real science essay that is mostly informative but still oddly out of place.

The worst example is the leading essay, meant to be a parody of a scientific report concerning formations of pasta in boiling water. Yeah, whatever. None of these really work together or with the theme of intelligent design or even with the book as a whole, so while individually, they’re not a problem to read, I’m not quite sure of the point. If the essays had focused on the theme, it might have made for a stronger book. But, really…

The point is the award “winners,” and there are so many here (129, in fact) that you will be treated to a giddy surfeit of really dim individuals doing really dumb things. If you like this kind of stuff, this is absolutely required reading. It would make a good gift book for the klutz in your life. –Mark Rose

Buy it at Amazon.
Discuss it in our forums.