Ed Helms

As one might guess from the title, SNAFU comprises a lot of brief anecdotes, outtakes from history. If I owned this book, it would be good reading material for the bathroom or other interludes not requiring a lot of attention. Reading it in large doses is a bit much.

In an attempt to keep this book humming along on an uninterrupted humorous note throughout, the author at times adopted an unrelenting flippant attitude. Example: the story of the first nuclear plant meltdown, at Chalk River, show more Ontario (just north of Ottawa). This story didn't really lean into the SNAFU aspect (and it was a major snafu, being a nuclear meltdown, and in addition the first ever, so they had no idea how to deal with it), but quickly slid right through the snafu so as to get on to the admittedly intriguing detail that help was requested from the USA -- perhaps assuming that folks who deliberately set off atomic bombs on their own territory and other peoples' might have some ideas about clean-up. A bold assumption but it seems to have panned out. That wasn't the interesting detail -- it was that they sent a team headed by then-lieutenant Jimmy Carter. Lt. Carter's handling of the crisis was adroit (had I known about this incident I would have had far more confidence in his presidency from the start); there were no snafus in the clean-up... other than the amount of radiation the team was exposed to, which was acceptable by the standards of the day but was actually quite high. The flippancy lies in the author's repeated references to Lt. Carter's "neon" pee (glowing may also have been mentioned). If this was intended as humour, it misses the mark; but it certainly isn't factual since pelvic radiation doesn't work like that. In a book reporting historical anecdotes, I prefer the author stick to facts.

The book was organized by decades, an obvious choice but perhaps tending to put too many similar events together. Interesting to imagine what other possible ways it could have been grouped. show less

Best for:
Folks looking for a bit of institutional schadenfreude.

In a nutshell:
Ed Helms narrates his book about a variety of events since the 1950s where things went wrong. They are often military in nature, though not always.

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
I had no idea Helms had a podcast, but I heard him guest on another podcast I enjoy (Behind the Bastards) and he mentioned this book, which sounded fun. It was … fine.

Review:
This is a very mild book that I can’t really review well one show more way or the other. It felt like the equivalent of a magazine read on a two-hour flight: served a purpose, sort of entertained me, probably wasn’t entirely as advertised, and will likely not stay with me in any real way.

Some of the stories Helms shares are fascinating, but I think my biggest issue is that many (even most) of them are not snafus - they aren’t fuck-ups, they’re just bad ideas. For example, one story is about the idea to set of a nuclear bomb on the moon. That’s not a whoopsie or an oops or a snafu - that’s just a really back fucking idea. Same with the story of using a cat with a microphone implant as a spy. Or the CIA spies who were also swingers. Bad ideas. Not snafus.

Some of the actual snafus are fascinating though - like the accidentally bomb drop that stemmed from the snafu of having the safety back-up disconnected during take-off. Or the one that I think is an actual excellent example of this - the Mars probe team using English units with metric calculations. That’s an epic fuck-up. I wish more of the stories were like this one, not one that talks about mistakenly investing in beenie babies.

I’d also have really enjoyed (for the ones that are actually snafus) some talk about how those issues could have been avoided / what lessons were learned and changes made so they wouldn’t happen again. But I guess that’s not funny content (or at least not inherently funny, so writers would have to work a bit to figure out how to share it).

There was clearly a lot of research put in as there are loads of different stories shared. I think for me they just are a bit all over the place. But I don’t feel like I wasted time reading it, so that’s good. show less

Helms produces a podcast on this subject and this is the first book on the subject which he promises will be a series. He explains how government and especially military organizations make serious errors because of shoddy planning or faulty assumptions. Major accidents such as the cargo ship that became stuck in the Suez Canal causing major economic hardships for business around the world are included.

A favourite target is government computers and the lack of security that allows hackers to show more wreck havoc on government programs. Some names that are part of stories are Presidents Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon and villains such as Manuel Noriega. Fun read presented with humour. Fully documented with lengthy bibliography. show less