Title: What Would MacGyver Do? True Stories of Improvised Genius in Everyday Life
Author: Brendan Vaughn
Genre: Nonfiction
Unlike my husband, parents, and brother, I’m not particularly clever when it comes to improvising with Swiss Amry knives and duct tape, or really anything else outside of the realm of cooking. So I had high expectations when What Would MacGyver Do? caught my eye at the library. Vaughn has collected stories from a variety of people, some of them ordinary people writing under assumed names, from his website.
And the book is about what you’d expect from a collection of writings from across the web. Some of the authors, such as Chuck Klostermann, are professionals, and their style is a lot more polished. Others are obviously edited versions of emails or comments. Everything is readable, but the quality of the storytelling is uneven.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t go so far as to call every one of the forty stories “improvised genius”. Improvised cleverness, sure, and some of them really are brilliant and really do save the day, such as the woman who improvised an asthma-inhaler diffuser for her friend. But you’d have to have a fairly generous definition of “saving the day” (essentially, one that includes “covering my ass”) to give full points to all the stories.
On the other hand, I do want to see if the series is available on DVD, and I will probably make sure to drop a ball of string and a coat hanger in my car, as those items figure in enough of the stories that it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.