Rating: 
Summary: Celebration of Stupidity
Review: Everyone loves to laugh at the mistakes of others, and the greater the level of stupidity, the funnier the story. It is difficult to feel bad for anyone that manages to end up with a Darwin Award, and this book demonstrates that there is nothing common about common sense to the folks unfortunate enough to merit a write up in this publication.Honestly, can you feel sorry for someone who agrees to stand under a hornet's nest while his "friends" pelt it with rocks? Can you picture this in your mind? What about someone using .22 caliber rifle shells for fuses or playing russian roulette with a semiautomatic? Granted, such stories seem to strain credibility, but we all have probably encountered someone in our lives, whose "moronic reasoning" seems to defy logic. For the uninitiated: A Darwin Award recipient must either have killed or sterilized himself by an act of obvious poor judgement. It goes without saying, that the majority are awarded posthumously. This is a great book but not for the faint at heart!
Rating: 
Summary: ha ha
Review: Funny book, except the author is obviously biased against men. It doesn't take much research to turn up the fact that women are much stupider (in general) when it comes to basic common sense stuff. Thus, there should be at least as many instances of stupid women snuffing themselves out as there are of men. Yet, she hardly touches on this vast sea of unused book fodder.
Rating: 
Summary: A delightful bathroom book
Review: Wendy Northcutt ...does a particularly good service in separating fact from fiction: the winner who tried out military surplus jet-assisted takeoff equipment on his 1967 Chevy Impala turns out to be an urban legend, while the unbelievable tale of the guy who tied helium balloons onto his lawn chair and floated into LAX airspace turns out to be true. She does, most unfortunately, further one myth of her own: It is not true that at the time of publication of Darwin's Origin of Species that scientists believed that the Earth was only 6000 years old. Despite what some creationists might claim, geologists had determined long before then that the world was millions of years old at least. I won't spoil the book by describing any other entertaining examples of Darwin Award candidates, since this is a delightful read and another good bathroom book.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious
Review: I think this book is extremely funny. I don't really understand a lot of the reviews here, complaining about how morbid and wrong this book is. The cover tells EXACTLY what the book is about, so don't buy it if you don't like this stuff. The stories in here, though, are quite funny. My favorites include the group of college students that decided to throw a party commemorating the arrival of a hurricane and the man who miscalculated the length of his bungy cord.
Rating: 
Summary: Where's the book??
Review: As a fan of the darwin awards themselves, I was pretty happy when someone gave me this book. After reading it, I was just happy I didn't pay for it myself. It appears that Wendy was in such a hurry to get a book out that she didn't bother to wairt until she actually had a book worth of stuff. The book, rather than being a pack of true Darwin Award stories, is divided among several types of tales. 1) True darwin stories. 2) Urban legends. That is, supposed Darwin Stories that it is now known are not true. Isn't the whole comical point of Darwin Stories supposed to be that they HAPPENED? The Urban legends might be interesting as an appended section in back, but they are spread throughout the book so that you have to be paying attention to separate them out from the true stories. 3) (I can't remember the exact name for these, but..) "It happened to a friend or to me" stories that people sent in. What the??? Why are these even in the book? They're about as confirmable as an Elvis sighting, and most aren't as funny. 4) (My own category) stories that are not true Darwin Stories of blockheaded people doing blockheaded things, but are merely people having temporary lapses in judgement of some kind (not paying attention in traffic for a second etc) Much more "there but for the grace of god go I" than funny. As precious few as they are, there are also problems with some of the 1) stories. Some feature the bonehead in question killing innocent people along with him/or her self These are more scary than funny. Also, I understand that snopes.com has debunked some of these "true" stories.
Oddly enough, this book misses because most of it violates the Darwin Criteria (stated in the book) itself.
2) and 3) violate the criteria that the story be confirmably true, and 4) violate the criteria that the person do something truly boneheaded, proving his/her favor to the gene pool by departing it. Boil it out, and you're left with maybe 10 pages of wheat and way too much chaff.
Rating:
Summary: Under the Shmuts, It's a Good Book
Review: Having a collection of the Darwin Awards is a wonderful idea, but it might have worked better if this had just been a collection of yearly lists marked by date, instead of a categorized mishmash with a lot of filler to puff it out to a more acceptable "book" size, so people will pay seventeen-nintey-five for it. The filler is written so poorly, it brings to mind high school essays that must be of a certain length, so they consist mostly of the same sentence written over and over, with slight word changes each time. Oh, and on page 14? It should be "one FEWER idiot." Just shows what kind of editing was going on over at Dutton. Not to mention the fact that quite a lot of Urban Legends slipped by Northcutt and her editors. I realize she takes her information from newspapers, but newspapers make mistakes, and I was able to check on the Urban Legend status of suspicious stories by simply running key words through snopes website, sitting right here at my computer, so how hard would it have been for Northcutt to have done the same? I mean really, if she's writing for national publication? That said, the whole concept of the Darwin Award is one of the great comedic efforts of our time. Not only that, it's found comedy, the best kind. Once I recovered from nit-picking, and got down to enjoying the book, I had a great time. This stuff is so funny, it can make the most intent cynic, or the most determined curmudgeon laugh. Yeah, we're laughing at people's misfortune; get over it. It's funny when the guy trips on the banana peel. When is it funny that your brother got into Harvard, or your neighbor won the lottery? At least we're laughing at a distance. And who knows; maybe someday YOU'LL be in the book. Maybe I will. (nah.)
Rating:
Summary: You will get addicted
Review: You will get addicted!
Even if you have no sence of humour, you will be laughing anytime you remember most of the stories in these books. You will be a changed person. There will be no dull moments. I LOVE IT! So will you.
Rating:
Summary: How can people be so stupid?
Review: Anyone who works with people will soon realize how stupid most of them are. But in this book you will see only the most amazing examples of total lack of common sense imaginable. I for one feel much safer knowing that they are not arount to pass on their genes.
Rating:
Summary: Very funny read that left me chuckling for hours
Review: Ms. Northcutt has finally gone where everyone else was too embarrassed to go themselves. This book, chock full of the humorous and sadly entertaining exploits of the less-than-prime-crop of our species will leave you with several out loud laughs and more than a few head shakings. I wholly recommend it to anyone who could use a smile on their face.
Rating:
Summary: Painfully entertaining
Review: When taken in small doses the reader will find "The Darwin Awards" sometimes hilarious, sometimes unbelievable, but almost always entertaining. One real weakness of the book is that the reader has to sift through Northcutt's banal chapter introductions to get to the "good stuff". Many times the introductions are just needless fluff. We KNOW these people did amazingly dumb things or they wouldn't be in the book! That aside, the stories about the award winners definitely overcome Northcutt's limitations as an author. (Maybe she should have thought about just being the "editor".) The chapters are well constructed and cover just about every imaginable subject under the sun. Particularily good are the chapters on "Animal Adventures" and "Fire and Explosion". As you read the book you'll do a lot of head-shaking - how CAN people be this stupid sometimes? If you enjoy reading about the misfortunes of others or just need a good laugh now and then, give this book a try. 3 and 1/2 stars.
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