A Book in Review – Nerds

Book Count: 37

Nerds: Who They are and Why We Need More of Them, By: David Anderegg, Ph.D.
Non-Fiction: physiology 253 pages, 2007

This book is all about the idea of the nerd/ geek in America. It talks about what a nerd is to different groups and at different times in one’s life, the history of nerdome and how this stereotype is affecting America. Some of this information is not surprising, such as telling kids and teens that people who are good in math and science are losers who will never get laid, decreases the number of people who do good in school in math and science. Some of it was surprising, such as how people we think of as intellectuals like Washington Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson helped the spread the idea of anti-intellectualism in America. This is a book we recommend to anyone interested in this subject, especially early teen and pre-teens that fear that they my be labeled as a nerd, so that they can use it to show their parents how they are ruining the next 6-8 years of their life by not getting them contacts, cool cloths or any of the other reasons that we wish this book was written 15 years earlier so we at least had independent proof that it was their fault that we were miserable in junior high and much of high school. (Note: if we sound bitter just blame it on the hormones, or learning that it could be someone’s fixable fault that all our friends [who were mostly our friends as they were the only people who would hang out with us] abandoned us at the start of 9th grade.)