Crash Test Girl

The Book in 1 Sentence

Kari Byron tells you the story of how she made the best of the decisions that allowed her to crash into her role at M5.

Brief Review

Kari tells a crazy story about how her life choices made her the weird, spunky, and highly intelligent co-host of MythBusters. A part of the "triplets" that had such great chemistry that their departure from the show was one of the saddest parts of it ending.

Why I Read this book

I really enjoyed Every Tool's a Hammer with all the additional stories about MythBusters and she was an entertaining part of the show.

In-Depth Review (Favorite Quotes)

I knew she was weird from when I would religiously watch MythBusters when it was initially coming out, but I did not know how weird. I think weird is the wrong word, so we will go with a more San Francisco word, zany.

However, her zaniness is something she owns and it is awesome. It isn't too often you meet/listen to a word traveler who went looking for spiritual enlightenment in India, for the person to tell her she wasn't going to find it. That she needed to find it where she belonged, in a studio painting.

The whole premise of the book is that life should be treated like a science experiment. Hypothesis, test, analyze. While the book is molded to that idea, the sections just fall flat mentality. The sections more show additional story beats rather than the actual testing or analysis of the hypothesis. I know that she is writing this retroactively and wasn't living her life following the scientific method, but the sections of the chapter just don't fit like I think they should.

Her stories are great though. What a rich life to have lead and to land at M5 which ended up being one of the biggest shows in the word and probably one of the shows that will last the longest in people's memories speaking that the experiments are still worth remembering.

How my life / behavior / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

This book isn't really for me. It is for young women and I had no idea really going into it, but I am still happy to have read it. She does provide some really good notes about how to handle life's issues as well as one thing that really stuck with me. To take the job at hand and plan like it is your life's mission. I am paraphrasing there, but its close. As she went through her career, she took the mindset that she was going to be the best at the job at hand. While this isn't new information or a new mindset, it is still a good reminder when I am sometimes looking at the work I need to do and just dread it.

Rating

I really enjoyed the books stories and the additional insights into her life, however the structure of the book just doesn't sit right with me. It feels forced and even in the book it feels like she fell into the book rather than wanting to write it. The stores are an 8, but the structure kills it. Makes this a 6.

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