Northcutt, Wendy. The Darwin Awards three: survival of the fittest.

NORTHCUTT, Wendy. The Darwin Awards three: survival of the fittest. Penguin, Plume. 252p. index. c2003. 0-452-28572-0. $11.00. SA

These are "all new stories commemorating individuals who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it," collected by Wendy Northcutt, the creator of the popular Web site www.DarwinAwards.com, established while she was at Stanford University in 1994. The archive has grown, winning dozens of Internet awards, and now ranks among the top 3,000 most visited Web sites, with about 500,000 hits a month.

The brief stories are mostly verified as true, though a reader will find it hard to credit the scope of human stupidity that sometimes leads to death (a Darwin Award) or to serious injury (Honorable Mention). Many are from newspaper accounts, but many are submitted by the victims of self-inflicted injury. A Darwin Award went to a police officer trying to show how a fellow officer accidentally killed himself. During the reenactment, the police officer killed himself with his own .357 Magnum. A college freshman died when he jumped into what he believed was a laundry chute in the school library. It was actually a trash chute leading to an automatic compactor. Two Hungarian farmers were electrocuted when they tried to kill a pig with a homemade stun gun. A man in Brazil died because he tied a plastic bag over his head to protect himself from bees but neglected to add air holes. The stories and accompanying commentary are amusing and cautionary. Janet Julian, Grafton, MA