American Nerd

One of the perks of Big Corporate Internship is books. Lots of books. It’s a magical world where brand new hardcover books are free, but tiny lunch sized bags of potato chips are $1.25. I don’t ask. I just check out the free book cases. It pays to check back frequently. That’s how I got a copy of “American Nerd; The Story of My People” by Benjamin Nugent.

You know, it’s actually really interesting. It isn’t as heavily cited as much of the Non-Fiction I read, but it also makes it good, light reading for the train compared to the last book I reviewed here, Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape. It also tangentially covers topics of race relations and US history in ways you may not have thought of them. For instance, Nugent argues early on that the ultra manly 20th century with its focus on football, danger, cars and so on was an inevitable throwback in the face of education, office work and unskilled labor replacing physically demanding jobs. There’s also the section on how Jews and Asians are routinely labeled AS CULTURES as being nerdy (and often weak or effeminate) because of a greater emphasis on learning while Africans bear the unique burden of being too human and therefore animal-like. Needless to say, some pretty scary stuff but you can see why he’d make the connection. People certainly act like these things are absolutely true. He also tries to define a nerd, which is more complicated than you would think. I used to have a whole taxonomy of nerdliness but junked it when I realized there was already a famous Geek Hierarchy.

Ultimately his definition revolves heavily around nerds acting highly mechanical. Now really, have I ever pretended to be inhuman in order to escape the backlash my insightful but tactless analyses might inspire? Oh wait. Yes. All the time. Well, even so, it’s a good read with an important message.

“The Pathos of Being a Nerd is that because you are comfortable with rational thought that you are cut off from the experience of spontaneous feelings, of romance, of nonrational connection to other people. A nerd is so often self loathing because he accepts the thinking/feeling rift and he knows and cares that other people accept it too. To be a nerd is often to live with a nagging feeling of one’s own incurable heartlessness.”

I liked the early section of defining and theorizing about the nature of the nerd more than the second, which is about first hand stories. For one, I don’t feel like they mesh. For another, I am a nerd, and don’t need to be told what pwnage is. And in many of the anecdotes, it’s hard to see where his theory fits in, even though I feel like his theory is generally correct.

It won’t win any awards, but if you are or know someone who is, may secretly be, or could be in danger of becoming a nerd, you might want to give it a whirl.