American Nerd: The Story of My People

This book was getting just enough media attention for me to crack it, but from what I found inside I wonder if anybody was actually reading it.

Don't get me wrong. It is fairly well written, moderately informative, and mostly entertaining. But, it fails in putting the biographical and the historical together in a cohesive way. Instead it tends to let the two act as if they have no reason to be in the same book. Ben Nugent talks about fictional characters and those from his own life to give one of the clearest pictures of what nerds are, but by separating them he never gets to any kind of universal statement on Nerdom.

This is only accented further by his talks about feudal roleplayers. While describing the social order and complexities of this particular group he tries to connect them to his past of boffing and D&D. This, while trying to show off the way nerds are always trying to create systems of order, seems to distract even more from his thesis.

While none of this is truly offensive, the book provides nothing in the way nerd culture has actually effected the world around it. In this way, Nugent only provides more description to probably one of the most self-described groups in our culture. There are no new thoughts on nerds, just one man's observations.