“It had a promising premise and a sort of endorsement by Chuck Klosterman (“…Benjamin Nugent is just weird enough to be absolutely right.”) but it didn’t really do much for me.
For one, I don’t really care to speculate on the origin of the nerd. Who was the first nerd? I don’t know, and neither does anybody else. Some caveman with poor vision and overzealous masturbatory habits who eventually found acceptance by creating the invention of the point, which his business partner applied to the stick and took most of the credit for.
We can speculate on some proto-nerds, but I feel like discussing Dr. Frankenstein and T.S. Eliot in the context of being some of the early nerds is, well, getting a little esoteric for my needs. Does nerd-dom need to have a history that pre-dates Eniac? I think not. Moreover, do I need to be aware of it?
The real problem I had with this book is that it read like a textbook to me, which is to say that it took some interesting stuff and bookended it with a bunch of stuff I didn’t care about. Plus, the organization seemed a little off. For example, the word “ratiocinative” was used on one page, then used on the very next page. If you want to choose to use a word like “ratiocinative” in a book about nerds, there might be some justification for it. I can cope. But why use it twice and then wait until that second instance to define it? That makes no sense. I’ve already either looked it up myself or decided that I don’t care to.
The sections all seem organized this way, information in piles instead of steady streams. Too much for me.”