Geeks. Nerds. Dorks.

These are the words that some of us have chosen to identify with. Geek is the new cool, geek is the new chic and we can now say it loud and proud. I’m the One That’s Cool is the new music video from The Guild and it depicts each cast member as a caricature of nerds getting picked on by the mean kids. The song is fun, catchy and Felicia Day is always so… well, cool! I can also fully relate to Amy Okuda as an awkward, Asian dork.

I went to public school for one year during my Freshman year. The worst that happened to me was I had one of the stupid boys in my Spanish class bump me with his ass against my desk on purpose. He also used to turn around and “mock” my long hair by singing the Maybelline commercial (maybe she’s born with it…). He was dumb and immature — in a weird way, I think he was trying to flirt more than bully me. Who knows. High school students remain a mystery to me then and especially now.

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Seems appropriate to be reviewing a book about the sinking of the Titanic’s effect on history, so close to the 100 year anniversary.

The Company of the Dead, by David Kowalski, starts out promisingly: A mysterious man is aboard the Titanic, and he seems to know an awful lot about what is going to happen. He’s there to try and avert one of the most famous maritime disasters. He fails. The repercussions of his failure are of epic proportions. The small changes he makes to the crash result in a wholly different world to our own.

The first World War never saw America enter the fray. Germany and Japan expanded their empires to cover the globe. The Southern States seceded again and this time it stuck. No more “United” States.

An interesting theory that, unfortunately, gets muddled by all of the action and conspiracy sections of the book. Unless handled with real precision and skill, I don’t think conspiracy really works well in books. It feels like reading a murder mystery where you aren’t given all of the clues, but the detective makes this big reveal and the reader just feels annoyed they couldn’t have come to that conclusion because they didn’t have all the facts.

The other problem I had was how long the book was. Kowalski’s ideas about an alternate history are really interesting, but it’s a slog to sift them out. His chapter breaks are also very odd. I feel like he was going for Dan Brown cliff hangers, but just ended up cutting up the flow. A minor point, but when you’re faced with that many pages, it gets annoying.

In a shorter format with fewer conspiracies, I feel like this could have been a really interesting book.