The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design

Wendy Northcutt is a graduate of UC-Berkeley with a degree in molecular biology. She started collecting the stories that make up the Darwin Awards in 1993, and founded www.DarwinAwards.com soon thereafter. She has been profiled in Salon magazine, and now divides her time between managing the website and working as an Internet consultant. Her award-winning website is one of the most popular humor sites on the web today, with over 400,000 visitors a month and growing. It has received acclaim from USA Today, the BBC and Yahoo!, and was chosen as a Cool Site of the Year 2000.

The fourth in a series of such books by the author, this seamless abridgment reports the antics of real individuals who have acted so stupidly that they sometimes die, thus removing themselves from the reproductive chain. Starting a paper fire under a car engine that is too cold to start, snowmobiling across water, blowing up outhouses, idiotic gun mishaps--these true stories are sometimes funny, sometimes sad. They are told alternately by the two narrators, whose pacing and phrasing serve the material well. Patrick Lawlor Girard's energetic performance includes foreign accents that work more often than not. His vocal skill and reportorial urgency make co-narrator Julie Schaller sound too innocent or casual by comparison. T.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine