Customer Reviews

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Prejudice is a nasty word - no educated person would tolerate bias based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or dozens of other individual differentiations. It's still OK to make fun of nerds, though. (Q: Do you know how to tell when a nerd likes you? A: He looks at your feet when he talks to you.) Anderegg digs into that prejudice with this book. He finds that its roots run surprisingly deep in American culture, and that its branches and leaves cast real shadows on America's future.

Remember Ichabod Crane and the legend of Sleepy Hollow? Ichabod, the town schoolmaster, dresses badly and looks funny. Brom, his nemesis, is popular, handsome, strong, and uneducated. In the end, Ichabod loses the girl, Brom gets her, Brom runs Ichabod out of town, and at least some of the townsfolk decide as a result that book learning would only harm their children. Fast forward almost two hundred years to the "Math is Hard" Barbie doll, stopping at presidential elections with educated losers, from Andrew Jackson to Al Gore. In most other popular cultures, the smart guy is also the athletic, happy, romantic, handsome, and well-liked one. In the US, the intellectual guy in the typical movie is none of those - and "transcends" his role only if he abandons it.

As a clinical child pyschologist, Anderegg explores some of the reasons why children might pick on those who do well academically. Whatever the reasons, children in grade school use "nerd" as an epithet that has real power to hurt, whether any one calling or called that has a strong idea of what it means. By seventh grade or so, the kids' herding instinct is also a hurting instinct. Despite the demonstrated irrationality of being "popular," kids will do anything to avoid being unpopular - and being a nerd is the easiest and perhaps most fixable way to be unpopular. If a kid is determined to avoid academic success, you can bet they'll succeed in avoiding it. By high school, the non-nerds have already given up literally years of exploration and education in math and physical sciences. Only the rarest among high school students can overcome that and go on to college and a career in technology.

And people wonder why more colleges graduate more PE majors than EEs. Well-meaning economic incentives come years too late to unravel the prejudices laid down earlier. If the math nerd is the one who never gets laid (regardless of whether anyone else does), would a $100 reward for acing algebra attract many high schoolers? Do the math.

Anderegg offers a few postive suggestions for parents of potential outcasts. Very often, even doting parents don't realize the power of kids' peer pressure, and a few innocuous aids to fitting in will go a long way. He also claims back Asperger's as a strictly defined medical term - as something present only if it debilitates the individual, not as a casual excuse or insult for someone whose focus isn't where the speaker's is. Without the shrillness of a nerd pride activist, Anderegg shows clearly why nerd prejudice has such far-reaching implications.

-- wiredweird, who calls himself a nerd

Nerds is a thoughtful and insightful look into the reasons for an accepted discrimination present in American society. It approaches its topic with humor and an expert's eye.

Any parent or teacher (I have taught sophomores for 14 years now) should definitely read this book. I found it enlightening and revealing.

You will never look at Ichabod Crane the same again...

Highly recommended.

The book offers a thorough look at a curiously ignored problem: why the nerd stereotype persists, and the damage it is causing. The author does a good job exploring such topics as what defines a nerd (though his parsing of differences between nerd and geek is a bit tedious and superfluous), how this label originated, how it impacts us as a society, and what to do about it.

He does try to utilize what little research evidence is out there on the subject, but the book is admittedly full of a lot of personal opinion and conjecture. But given the sparse and maddingly vague nature of the scientific data concerning this issue, one can't fault him too much, and he does repeatedly try to present all sides and remind readers of the dangers of coming to dogmatic conclusions about sociological and pschological phenomenon (though he rightly argues that the official diagnostic criteria of the Mental Health profession ought to considered the authority when addressing what some consider the 'abnormalcy' of nerds).

It is a good book about a real problem. There is so much that is good and beneficial in the life of the mind and the experiences offered to kids who are allowed to explore their interests without being poked fun at for it. His comments on Scouting and how the idea that it's a nerdy thing deserve a big hooray, to give an example.

A great read for parents and teachers alike, especially those trying to understand why their normally bright student is suddenly doing worse academically. It could very well be his/her fear of being labelled a nerd, according to the author.

I purchased this book after hearing an interview with Dr. Anderegg on the "Bob Edwards Show". I work with middle school and high school students and I was looking forward to reading this book. It was a big disappointment for several reasons.

Dr. Anderegg spends a great deal of time deconstructing the nerd/geek and the myths that surround them. Some of this gets very tedious and, I believe, will lose the lay reader (I have a fair amount of background in this area and he almost lost me at mid-book).

Dr. Anderegg gets VERY preachy at times. This particularly true in his concluding chapter. It's funny because the people most likely to buy and read the book, are the ones who are least likely to need the preaching.

I would have liked more conversations with kids about nerds, geeks and social isolation. That would have been interesting. The chapter titles are clever, I only wish the content had been on the same level.

The book is fairly preachy, which is annoying because the type of people likely to read it do not need the preaching. Also, a lot of it is stating the obvious. Hence 3 stars.

OTOH, I was struck by the observation that in order to find math and science attractive, a child must enjoy precision -- must receive real pleasure out of getting RIGHT answer, as opposed to "sort of right". Children who naturally enjoy precision are "geeks". Children who do not could probably learn it, but it should be taught at elementary school level, and elementary schools do not seem to be even aware there is a problem to be fixed.

But even if elementary schools were aware of the problem, how exactly do you instill a love of precision in someone who does not already have it? Doing math problems can make a child good at doing math problems, but will not make him like it -- and once he is in middle school and finds out that "math is uncool", he will start avoiding it. How do you teach a child to LIKE numbers and formulae?

One possible answer is make games such as Dungeons & Dragons, with their endless calculations and probabilities, a part of elementary school curricula. When precise answer gets you the dragon hoard, and "sort of right" answer gets your character fried, precision becomes fun.

Now wait for "Satanism in schools!" cries. One... two...

I really enjoyed this book. I read it while I was nursing my newborn son. I was looking down at my cutie, hoping that he would be "nerdy" - as in smart, interested in science and technology, and not too worried about peer acceptance...but also hoping he wouldn't be teased as a nerd. Would his adorable good looks save him? :-) What if he's athletic - will that also rule out intellectual (as in the nerd/jock dichotomy that Anderegg discusses in the book)?

Anyway, the book really opened my eyes to the nerd stereotype in America. I now think of the words "nerd" or "geek" in a positive light, working in the high-tech/software industry, and enjoying people who are enthusiastic about their hobbies, however eccentric. Yes, I have a friend who plays Warhammer, many who play World of Warcraft, LARP, roleplay, read fantasy and science fiction. Most people I know work in the software industry as I do live in Boston. All of these people are attractive, socially adept adults - not the "nerd" stereotype by far. Geeks are cool, in other words. However, this book reminded me just how negatively our culture views intellectual pursuits and those who pursue them. Then I began to see it in the media myself, as I watched television and movies that week.

I like that the author is a child psychologist. Much of this book is about the effect of the nerd/geek stereotype on our children. It is not only affecting the nerd-labelled kids, but it also keeps other children from pursuing science and technology for fear of being called a nerd. In other words, it's holding back American children from their potential. The author really seems to understand kids, so this book also counts as a parenting book, on how to nurture our nerdy - or non-nerdy - children. In fact, he points out that as adults, we've escaped the "middle school mentality" that perpetuates the teasing and reminds us of what our children may be experiencing. In some cases, he does advise that we let our children conform if they so wish - such as the sixth grader who wanted to wear jeans to school to fit in - he advised the parents to simply buy the kid a pair no matter what their stance on "fashion" and "fitting in" may be.

He also talked about the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis in a new way, saying that it's wrong for us to be labelling a personality type as a "disease" - that like ADD, people are being overdiagnosed with AS. I completely agree - and as someone that overcame shy and introverted tendencies myself to now being a friendly, outgoing person - I am glad that I was never diagnosed with a disease that I might have resigned myself to having, rather than pushing myself to come out of my shell. When reading the examples where Bill Gates is called "classic AS", it almost seems like Asperger's parents and patients are grasping to point out possible successful AS people.

Yes, at times, I felt he belabored points, or got far too into details like describing the ins and outs of Warhammer, for example. Overall, the book was an enjoyable read and I don't have the academic chops to evaluate it on any other level.

Scientific writing, when done well, is a creative art as well as a compilation of meticulous research. Here, Dr Anderegg does well to put forth 'The World of The Outcast' for the society which created it. Modern day America classifies, insults, and even neglects the people unlucky enough to earn the title 'nerd', and with a beautiful mix of child psychology and adult sociology, Anderegg keeps the reader engaged. This is science, but it is not convoluted geneology, thick with quotations in foreign languages and professional terminology. It is accesible to all (including the non-nerds among us), and is sure to cultivate interest in social psychology as well as childhood development. I recommend this book to anyone who has ever seen, been, or thought about a nerdy child, as well as to anyone interested in a fascinating, quirky look at American history, culture, and psychology.

You will notice upon looking at the title of this book that the author seems to suggest in the very naming of his work some strategy for how intellectualism may be beneficial to America. Instead, he spends the entire 250+ book discussing various origins of and social factors in the construction of the idea of "nerd" in society. I picked this book out from the sociology section of my local book store, so I would have hoped that this discussion would have been inspired more by actual social phenomenon and less by the pseudo-psychological. There is no doubt after reading NERDS that the author is a very intelligent man, and he certainly did his research. It just seemed to me like he should have focused more on the title of the book instead of the introduction to the premise.

Overall, NERDS is a very interesting read. But if you're a sociology student or are interested in the author's ideas for how to fix the US anti-intellectual problem, you'll be frustrated for the majority of the book.

Excellent book. It cleverly dissects a unique prejudice. It shed light on many cultural phenomena I had observed yet never quite understood, such as the strangely negative "stigma" being successful in Math carries, or the Nerd/Jock saga observed in American high schools. The author's analysis of the 2000 Presidential election in light of this Nerd/Jock struggle was intriguing. I highly recommend this book, especially for parents.

Not a bad book. Not really scientific enough for my case. I would have liked more case studies and less philosophizing. But, very informative as a whole. I've learned that I have avoid the nerd stereotype with my self confidence (uncalled for?) and the easy with which I deflect criticism. Which I would agree was very handy in the vicious middle school years. My keen fashion sense also help (you can't call me a geek for that reference, since that means you know it too).