Book Review - Oops: 20 Life Lessons from the Fiascoes that Shaped America

There are several degrees of separation between trivia and information. The gap consists of the usefulness of the data. Martin Smith and Patrick Kiger aimed at co-authoring a book of useful information in Oops: 20 Life Lessons from the Fiascoes That Shaped America, but their effort is actually a collection of trivia. They frustratingly missed their mark by only a few ticks.

The twenty examples selected by Smith and Kiger are certainly entertaining. They run the gamut from engineering and marketing, to botany and science. The authors scrutinize the bad judgment behind the 1974 Cleveland baseball stadium Ten-Cent Beer Night, the 1955 pink car called La Femme that Dodge built for women drivers, the 1978 crowning of Leon Spinks as Heavyweight Champion of the World and the 1930 introduction of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. Although many of the screw-ups are utterly hilarious, such as the 1967 booking of Jimi Hendrix as the opening act for The Monkees, it is quite a stretch to suggest these incidents had enough clout to shape America. The 1960s pop fashion fad of paper dresses and the hype of "Smell-O-Vision" were barely blips on the radar screen of trends and cannot be attributed with enough weight to have historical influence. Perhaps it would be more accurate for the authors to offer these as fiascoes that shaped American Popular Culture. Smith and Kiger co-authored a prior book titled Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore That Shaped Modern America, which telegraphs their punch in the current book.

As modern journalists, Smith and Kiger have learned that Americans are "fascinated with failure." The goal is to take this fascination beyond schadenfreude and help teach from other's mistakes. Smith and Kiger declare an intent to offer "lessons that can be used for everything from a personal mantra to a philosophy of business." The authors do that, but with misplaced emphasis. These lessons (such as "Pandering Will Get You Nowhere," "Beward of Unproven Technologies," "Understand The Market" and "Occasionally Look Up From Your Workbench") should be the most valuable part of the book, and yet they are reduced to mere sentence fragments preceding each chapter headline. Rather than acting as a quickie gloss, the lessons should be amplified and discussed at the end of each fiasco so the information can be put to some constructive use. Appearing instead at the conclusion of each chapter is a 3-inch box containing a "Recipe For Disaster" which is a faux cook book recipe consisting of bad puns and tired clichés. These flat jokes are the weakest feature of Oops and it is hard to imagine the authors thinking them clever or an editor agreeing to include them.

In place of such embarrassing indulgences, why not some photographs to illustrate the chapters? Photos would have helped tremendously in showing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in mid-collapse, the ungainliness of the flying car and the annoying appearance of Microsoft's Clippy character. The complete absence of photographs from a book that would have benefited from them indicates a failure in vision, in budget, in permission clearance or all three.

The research for Oops is generally solid, with some pitfalls. The notes show only a couple references to the far from reliable work-in-progress known as Wikipedia, when even one trip to that realm of truthiness may be too many for a research-based book like this. There are no footnotes or endnote attributions, making follow-up research more difficult than it should be. For example, a chapter on leisure suits (yes, there is a chapter on leisure suits) mentions a 1977 legal case testing the constitutionality of dress codes, but provides no case citation and merely refers to "a California court" without saying what level of court. The authors brush aside the issue of documentation in the Chapter Notes section by saying, "Rather than bog down the chapters with footnotes, endnotes, or cumbersome attribution, we stuffed all that into this easily avoidable section and hid it way in the back of the book. The information is here if you need it, but really, it's pretty dull stuff." Whether tongue in cheek or sincere, that attitude is exactly what prevents Oops from achieving legitimacy and diminishes it to the more common pile of mildly entertaining trivia.