Customer Reviews

College in a Nutskull: A Crash Ed Course in Higher Education

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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This amusing look at student bloopers has given our household hours of hilarious laughter, especially from our two college aged boys (correction: young men). Thank you! JCS

Once I figured out what the premise of College in a Nutskull was (people's test/paper responses that are horribly inaccurate, hilarious mistakes etc) I was really looking forward to reading it. And while it was a lot of fun I would definitely point out that this should be used as a coffee table book, don't try to read it in a sitting or even really a spam of a few days (yes I totally did that) because it does begin to get repetitive but reading from it now and again I think would be a great idea.

This might make me fodder for the book but here's the three ways I reacted to the passages in the book.

1. I totally knew what the correct information was and found the person's answer to be really funny!

2. I wasn't exactly sure what the right answer was but I knew what they had written was definitely wrong.

3. I know nothing about this subject matter so I'm not really sure what's funny about this.

So obviously some sections I liked better than others, art being my favorite. The history section is pretty lengthy but that makes sense since the man that compiled and edited it is a chairman of a history department.

While I understand why the format and binding of a spiral notebook was appropriate I really do not like spiral spines for reading, the pages snag on the rings and it's hard to keep the pages flipping. I think maybe a better solution would have been to have the book look like a composition notebook, it would still look like a notebook but with better binding! I do like that the inside was laid out as a notebook as well, with doodles, pictures, handwriting in some places etc.

Overall this might be a fun coffee table book for those interested in scholarly humor.

College in a Nutskull has a creative design and contains a lot of new, genuine student mistakes.

But the book's main flaw is that few of the mistakes are actually funny.

A true blooper is more than just a factual mistake. Yet many of the so-called bloopers in College in a Nutskull are little more than factual mistakes.

For example, I do not consider these mistakes from College in a Nutskull to be true bloopers:

"Common law is for the common people" (p 92).

"The Prime Minister heads the Church of England" (p 94).

"American women won the right to vote in 1973" (p 131).

I much prefer Henriksson's earlier compilation, Ignorance is Blitz (2008) (published originally as Non Campus Mentis in 2001).

Compare the mistakes listed above from College in a Nutskull with these true bloopers from Ignorance is Blitz:

"The invention of the sex tent helped to determine place and orientation at sea" (p 47).

"Francis Drake was permitted by Queen Elizabeth to sail the seas and find illegal things to do with the Spanish" (p 48).

"Oliver Cromwell solved this and other problems by removing prominent things from people who disagreed with him" (p 59).

These bloopers are more than mere mistakes; the humor comes from an extra element. In these examples, that extra element is a double meaning.

Sometimes, the extra element in Ignorance is Blitz comes from a humorous absurdity. Examples are:

"[Roman] Senators wore purple tubas as a sign of respect" (p 18).

"Two hundred years of rule by the Tarts explains why Russia became so backward" (p 37).

"The modern piano replaced the clavicle as instrument of choice" (p 66).

For many of the bloopers in College in a Nutskull, these extra elements are missing.

As a result, College in a Nutskull -- unlike Ignorance is Blitz -- fails the main test of any blooper book: many of the bloopers in College in a Nutskull, to me at least, are not funny.

This was given as a gift to a Resident Educator upon the graduation of my 2 daughters last week. It's hard to be an RE sometimes, and laughter can help immensely. I personally gave it to a professor friend, and she read it aloud and had the whole room in tears. Other professors stopped in to see what was going on in that room!

I ordered this little nugget of joy after having read Non Campus Mentis and was expecting the same level of hilarity and embarrassing amounts of ignorance and stupidity as was was displayed in that volume. I was not disappointed. This book truly delivers on the belly-laughs and cringe inducing theses. If you have difficulty believing that America has seriously fallen behind in the education race, read this book!