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It seemed to be something of a staple of 80′s television series such as The A-Team, and MacGyver that at some point the heroes would be in a situation where they would need to make something to get them out of whatever predicament they were in.

In the case of The A-Team this usually consisted of them being locked in some sort of shed that had a rusty old car as well as some handy sheets of metal, a blow torch, and some sort of cobbled together automatic weapon in order for them to be able to build a kind of tank in which they could escape and save the day.

MacGyver on the other hand was a bit more inventive and used real science and items he would likely find lying around, although they were quick to put in that you’d have to be incredibly lucky for a lot of these fixes to work.

Hence when I saw this book I was quite excited to see what real everyday people just like me had managed to come up with. Unfortunately, at least judging by the review of the book here, it seems as if a lot of the fixes aren’t actually all that inventive, consisting of things such as the girl with the broken bikini who ‘MacGyvered’ it by using the incredibly inventive method of tying the snapped ends together. Me myself, the closest I think I’ve probably come to ‘MacGyvering’ anything is when I opened up my Guitar Hero controller and fixed it myself with only a screwdriver.

I guess all this book really gives us, apart from some readable and entertaining stories as well as a bit of a giggle, is a realisation of just how amazing people like Macgyver really are, (or at least would be if they weren’t fictional and backed up by a large of team of script writers and researchers) and how most of us simply pale in comparison to their ingenuity.