Failure™ Magazine

The Final Four of Everything

The Final Four of Everything, by Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir, Simon & Schuster.

Review by Dave de Angry  Filed under Book Reviews

Who is the more notorious financial villain, Charles Ponzi or Bernard Madoff? Who died the most untimely death, Lou Gehrig or Otis Redding? And which college nickname is more absurd, the Banana Slugs or the Nads? “The Final Four of Everything” provides answers to these questions—and many more.

In a nutshell, “The Final Four of Everything” expands the concept of bracketology—“a knockout tournament format made famous by the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament”—and applies it to anything and everything. The authors present 150 different brackets (grouped by subject), each bracket pairing contestants in a succession of elimination rounds—winnowing the contenders down to a Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight and Final Four before ultimately declaring a “winner.”

For what it’s worth, many of the brackets are concocted by “experts and celebrated authorities” (such as political commentator Mary Matalin, movie critic A.O. Scott, writer Stefan Fatsis, historian David Oshinsky and television personality Bill Geist), some of whom admittedly determine competitors and winners by whim alone. For example, in “American Guns,” writer Stephen Hunter proclaims, “Guns made famous by movies are favored over guns useful to history, probably because I prefer movies to history.”

The contests range from the obvious (“Supreme Court Decisions,” “Baseball Moments” and “Gangster Films”) to the imaginative (“Worst Movies by Great Directors” and “Ringless Athletes”) to the hilarious (“Celebrity Mugshots” and “Sexually Inadequate Nicknames”). Some brackets can best be described as “odd,” as in “It’s Better with Bacon” (by “one of the world’s leading hamthropologists”), and “Nothing but the Tooth” (in which a dentist crowns the most functional and aesthetically pleasing tooth).

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