SNAFU
The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screwups
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Bestseller
From actor, comedian, writer, and host of the hit history podcast SNAFU, Ed Helms brings you an absurdly entertaining look at history’s biggest blunders, complete with lively illustrations.
History contains a plethora of insane screwups—otherwise known as SNAFUs. Coined during World War I, SNAFU is an acronym that stands for Situation Normal: All F*cked Up. In other words, “things are pretty screwed up, but aren’t they always?”
Spanning from the 1950’s to the present day, SNAFU features Ed Helms as unofficial history teacher with a loving tribute to humanity's finest face-plants, diving into each decade’s craziest SNAFUs. From planting nukes on the moon to training felines as CIA spies to weaponizing the weather, this book unpacks the incredibly ironic decision-making and hilariously terrifying aftermath of America’s biggest mishaps.
Filled with sharp humor and lively illustrations, SNAFU is a wild ride through time that covers the head-scratching and occasionally inspiring blunders that have shaped our world and made historians spit-take. They're the kinds of stories that not only entertain but offers fresh insights that just might prevent history from repeating itself again and again.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In his hilarious collection of colossal flubs, actor and comedian Ed Helms brings his fascinating SNAFU podcast to the page. Helms delights in digging up some of the most ludicrous large-scale blunders in history and unveiling them in all their glory. Covering foul-ups from the ’50s to the 2000s, Helms gleefully digs into the “What could go wrong?” follies with tales of an “atomic lab” kids’ toy that included actual radioactive material and a simulated Air Force combat mission that accidentally dropped a real bomb on a small South Carolina town. Then there was the time the CIA decided to implant a listening device inside a living cat. In the “you had one job” department, you’ll encounter such incidents as somebody pushing the wrong button and putting Hawaii residents on blast with a real missile alert that was meant to be a test. Helms relates these stories with a historian’s thoroughness and his trademark comic touch. Unless you’re one of the people described in SNAFU, you’ll come away feeling a lot better about your biggest mistakes—and you’ll get in plenty of laughs, too.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Comedian Helms debuts with an informative and amusing survey of the American government's wildest mistakes. Adapted from Helms's podcast of the same name, the book sorts errors into eras, beginning with the 1950s and ending in 2021. Some of the SNAFUs are well-known, like the CIA's MKUltra program ("the Greatest Generation's own twisted version of ‘fuck around and find out' "). Others are relatively unknown and startlingly weird, like scientists' ill-fated attempt to nuke a portion of the moon in a show of dominance over Soviet Union space pioneers (the plan was abandoned when it was pointed out that the moon would just become a dust cloud—"So anticlimactic"). And some SNAFUs are just unsettling, like multiple attempts made at surveillance by attaching cameras or listening devices to common animals, such as cats and pigeons. With his wry intelligence, Helms makes an ideal guide through these historical blunders; one can picture him in his former role as a Daily Show correspondent, with his eyebrow always raised in conspiratorial disbelief. Bracingly, the book constitutes a call for optimism in the face of the world's apparent unraveling: "We've been here before," Helms reassures, "and we'll get through this, too"—after all, America's "situation normal" is "all fucked up." It's a charming and irreverent alternative history.
