You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by ashley_kelmore
Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screwups by Ed Helms
3.0
Best for:
Folks looking for a bit of institutional schadenfreude.
In a nutshell:
Ed Helms narrates his book about a variety of events since the 1950s where things went wrong. They are often military in nature, though not always.
Worth quoting:
N/A
Why I chose it:
I had no idea Helms had a podcast, but I heard him guest on another podcast I enjoy (Behind the Bastards) and he mentioned this book, which sounded fun. It was … fine.
Review:
This is a very mild book that I can’t really review well one way or the other. It felt like the equivalent of a magazine read on a two-hour flight: served a purpose, sort of entertained me, probably wasn’t entirely as advertised, and will likely not stay with me in any real way.
Some of the stories Helms shares are fascinating, but I think my biggest issue is that many (even most) of them are not snafus - they aren’t fuck-ups, they’re just bad ideas. For example, one story is about the idea to set of a nuclear bomb on the moon. That’s not a whoopsie or an oops or a snafu - that’s just a really back fucking idea. Same with the story of using a cat with a microphone implant as a spy. Or the CIA spies who were also swingers. Bad ideas. Not snafus.
Some of the actual snafus are fascinating though - like the accidentally bomb drop that stemmed from the snafu of having the safety back-up disconnected during take-off. Or the one that I think is an actual excellent example of this - the Mars probe team using English units with metric calculations. That’s an epic fuck-up. I wish more of the stories were like this one, not one that talks about mistakenly investing in beenie babies.
I’d also have really enjoyed (for the ones that are actually snafus) some talk about how those issues could have been avoided / what lessons were learned and changes made so they wouldn’t happen again. But I guess that’s not funny content (or at least not inherently funny, so writers would have to work a bit to figure out how to share it).
There was clearly a lot of research put in as there are loads of different stories shared. I think for me they just are a bit all over the place. But I don’t feel like I wasted time reading it, so that’s good.
Folks looking for a bit of institutional schadenfreude.
In a nutshell:
Ed Helms narrates his book about a variety of events since the 1950s where things went wrong. They are often military in nature, though not always.
Worth quoting:
N/A
Why I chose it:
I had no idea Helms had a podcast, but I heard him guest on another podcast I enjoy (Behind the Bastards) and he mentioned this book, which sounded fun. It was … fine.
Review:
This is a very mild book that I can’t really review well one way or the other. It felt like the equivalent of a magazine read on a two-hour flight: served a purpose, sort of entertained me, probably wasn’t entirely as advertised, and will likely not stay with me in any real way.
Some of the stories Helms shares are fascinating, but I think my biggest issue is that many (even most) of them are not snafus - they aren’t fuck-ups, they’re just bad ideas. For example, one story is about the idea to set of a nuclear bomb on the moon. That’s not a whoopsie or an oops or a snafu - that’s just a really back fucking idea. Same with the story of using a cat with a microphone implant as a spy. Or the CIA spies who were also swingers. Bad ideas. Not snafus.
Some of the actual snafus are fascinating though - like the accidentally bomb drop that stemmed from the snafu of having the safety back-up disconnected during take-off. Or the one that I think is an actual excellent example of this - the Mars probe team using English units with metric calculations. That’s an epic fuck-up. I wish more of the stories were like this one, not one that talks about mistakenly investing in beenie babies.
I’d also have really enjoyed (for the ones that are actually snafus) some talk about how those issues could have been avoided / what lessons were learned and changes made so they wouldn’t happen again. But I guess that’s not funny content (or at least not inherently funny, so writers would have to work a bit to figure out how to share it).
There was clearly a lot of research put in as there are loads of different stories shared. I think for me they just are a bit all over the place. But I don’t feel like I wasted time reading it, so that’s good.