Witty and expansive, Ellenberg’s math will leave readers informed, intrigued and armed with plenty of impressive...
It’s time to drop the idea that mathematics is an esoteric field best left to a few academics. In fact, writes Ellenberg (Mathematics/Univ. of Wisconsin), the truth is better: Math is everywhere, and the knowledge it yields can benefit everyone.
The structure of the world around us—everything from the genetics that determine height to intricacies of electoral politics—is infused with the principles of mathematics. Ellenberg, author of the “Do the Math” column at Slate, argues that math is not relegated to the set of hard and fast rules taught in classrooms. Instead, the field is an extension of common sense that has the potential for sophisticated and deeply insightful applications that produce better results than common sense alone. The author avoids heavy jargon and relies on real-world anecdotes and basic equations and illustrations to communicate how even simple math is a powerful tool. In addition to grand applications like those used in calculus or physics, mathematical principles can be wielded pragmatically to improve decision-making and better parse splashy claims made about the stock market or lottery—or, more humorously, claims that hidden codes embedded in the Bible can predict the future. Importantly, Ellenberg insists that improbable things happen all the time, and they can’t be taken at face value; there is frequently more information available that will improve a calculation’s result and eliminate statistical anomalies, however tempting those are to believe. The author writes that, at its core, math is a special thing and produces a feeling of understanding unattainable elsewhere: “You feel you’ve reached into the universe’s guts and put your hand on the wire.” Math is profound, and profoundly awesome, so we should use it well—or risk being wrong.
Witty and expansive, Ellenberg’s math will leave readers informed, intrigued and armed with plenty of impressive conversation starters.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-522-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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