We All Need Heroes: Stories of the Brave and Foolish by Simon Zingerman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
One day, maybe a month or so ago, Simon Zingerman contacted me here on Goodreads and asked me to review a .pdf edition of his new book in exchange for a paperback copy of it. I had a look at it and it seemed interesting so I accepted.
In hindsight, his sending the book to me for free was a purposeful move: We All Need Heroes is basically a very optimistic collection of around 120 stories of people who made it or became famous either through extreme luck, fantastic ideas, dedication to their beliefs or pure, simple “stupidity” (quoting because their supposed stupidity ultimately worked to their advantage). Some of these accounts are exactly about how you can create buzz about your work in the very same “guerilla” way the author contacted me and many other users of Goodreads also. Apart from that, the stories themselves were in general quite interesting and my picks -the ones I felt could be significant for me personally- made up a good chunk of the book. That said, I can see how the next time I read it my favourites will have changed along with me, just like Simon Zingerman predicts -and even hopes- will happen in his introduction to the book.
The work unfortunately has its little problems. I didn’t particularly care for the “happy ending”, “risky/illegal”, “disturbed/crazy” etc. 0-100% statistics at the bottom of every story. By what standard is one story a 50% and another an 80%? The assessment would make sense if there was a “Top 10 happiest endings” chart at the end of the book or something similar, but there was nothing of the sort. After the first few pages, I started hungrily devouring one story after another, skipping these gauges entirely. The keywords under the title of each story were met with the same fate. Zingerman’s graphic design touches seem to have worked well in many aspects but not so much in others.
But I won’t be too critical of the details. This book has given me food for thought and inspiration and I will be sure to read it again, this time taking notes.
