This is a fun book. It describes various disasters in our history and attempts to derive lessons from them. The lessons are a bit trite (the chapter on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge has the admonition, “Ignore the past at your peril.”) but tinged with humor that is dry and fairly tongue-in-cheek. One of my favorite lines is from the chapter on the Kaiser-Hughes flying boat: “If you’re crazy enough to take on an incredibly difficult project in an unrealistically short deadline, don’t ask an even crazier person to help you get it done.” Good stuff! Other entertaining sections talk about the infamous ten-cent beer night at a Cleveland Indians game and Microsoft’s Clippy, called “the Jar Jar Binks of word processing.” Most of these stories I already knew in a general sense, but not in much detail. For instance, I knew that the unlikely duo of Jimi Hendrix and the Monkees toured together but not how it happened or why anyone thought it was a good idea!
The cover is clever; what looks like a printing mistake on a book named Oops. Ironically, the way I obtained the book also is an apparent oops. I entered a contest on InBubbleWrap and was told I’d won a copy of Oops. A month goes by, and nothing arrives. I sent them a note and got a very nice reply saying they’d look into the mix up. Another month and I send another email. Another reply with another apology, but this time a week or so later Oops arrives at my house. Ironic that a book with this title had such a hard time arriving!
Whether we’re shocked by a “wardrobe malfunction” or hooting as a reality-show contestant is humiliated on national television, Americans are none-too-secretly fascinated with failure—and with good reason.
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