American Nerd (24)

Title: American Nerd: Story of My People
Author: Benjamin Nugent
Genre: Non-Fiction

American Nerd is a combination social history and personal memoir and in my mind it failed, in a small way, at both roles. The book lacked cohesion and a smooth narrative flow. It seemed disjointed. There were elements of Nugent's personal history and actual historical analysis and facts that were terribly fascinating (for example the deep antisemitism that preceded anti-nerd/anti-"sissy" bias in late 19th and 20th century American society) but I can't say I enjoyed reading it terribly much.

What I did enjoy very much were the interesting historical notes (though there were many boring or questionable facts in the book), when Nugent examined his own personal history as a nerd and the exploration of the relationship between nerd-ism and Asperger's syndrome. However in that section on Asperger's Nugent threw out a statistic that said 80% of down syndrome fetuses are aborted. That statistic wasn't attributed, no footnote accompanied it. I find this perplexing and I kept thinking about it for the remainder of the book. 80% is such a high number that I was shocked that he'd throw it out without any documentation to back it up. Perhaps it's a sign of my own state of nerdiness that I couldn't concentrate on the rest of the book and as soon as I finished the book I tried to nail down whether or not that statistic is true.

As far as I can find there is no real evidence indicating that 80% of down syndrome fetuses are aborted. I found articles online saying 60%, 70% and even 90% are but no firm evidence to support any particular number. This brief research on my part makes me like the book even less than I already did. Since the author gave this easily disputed statistic as fact it makes me question what other historical and quasi-scientific data in the book isn't quite accurate.