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(More customer reviews)I consider myself a geek. I play Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft, and read comics when I can. I also work in IT, which lends itself to geek culture. I do not live in my mom's basement - and I am not "forever alone" as I have a wife and kid.
I purchased this book because of the recent popularity of geek culture. Geek culture is everywhere now. I feel the idea of an all-encompassing book on geek culture as a whole is an interesting idea. Everyone is a geek these days. I don't mind - I love that the San Diego Comic-Con and movies like The Dark Knight are mainstream. I love that everyone can use an iPhone and Facebook.
While this book does not completely encompass geek culture, it comes close. It does not contain every single subject matter/person/word related to anything geek - it contains subject matters that are interesting. For example, it does not include every comic book character ever created - but it does have the important ones, and some obscure and humorous ones - such as Arm Fall Off Boy.
Although the book contains the must-know information for geek culture - the authors, in many instances, have chosen interesting subject matters over the obvious subject matters - for example, Scott McCloud and his theories on comics are discussed, whereas a comprehensive guide to, say, Spider-man should be found in a more focused source - because everyone knows about Spider-man! The book includes Spider-Man, and The Force - which will be useful to non-geeks - but for me, I need the nitty gritty. It also includes many modern memes and relevant information related to present day geekery, as well as past topics such as 80's cartoons like Thundercats, to early geek periods of D&D, Adam West's Batman, Pong, and information relating to historical geek subjects, such as H.P. Lovecraft.
The book contains interesting topics such as:
-Fictional board games in Science Fiction, such as Star Trek
-History of the High Score in Video Games
-The founder of Apple computers you may not have heard of
-Shout-outs to some of my favorite shows/movies: Dexter, Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Alien, Battle Royale, The Big Lebowski
-Insight into Anime/Manga - I now know how hardcore anime/manga fans are
-World Superhero Registry - a real-life superhero organization
-For those that enjoy hard sci-fi - there are many Niven/Asimov references.
-My favorite sections were the science/computer section and the games section (RPG's, board Games, Video game dynamics). The insights are not necessarily surface level, but more deep such as "Instance Dungeon," pro methods for solving a Rubik's Cube, and Thac0.
Basically - this book is comprehensive. That is just a small sample of the information contained in these pages. I wrote this review because I appreciate geek culture and feel that this book comes very close to including just about every obscure topic a geek could love. And with each subject, there is interesting information presented as well as actually very funny comments/quizzes/usage/and other sidebars. This book is funny. It is not written like a humorless textbook. Also, the humor is not always necessarily what I would call "mainstream" - it is off-kilter, sometimes quirky- which is more enjoyable to me, and I feel to geeks. Let's just say it is more Conan O'brien than Jay Leno. This book is light-hearted and not meant to be all-encompassing (it doesn't include the entire lineage of Bilbo Baggins or anything like that - if you want that, read LOTR), or too technical ( it is not a book full of programming terms or text-lingo like LOL), but it covers and compiles a broad range of fascinating, true geek material from an extensive range of subject matters. Yes, it does have zombies.
This book will join books such as Feast of Crows, The Onion's Our Front Pages, and Infinite Jest in my extensive and distinguished bathroom libary.
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