A revealing look at the numbers, how they’re derived and interpreted, and how they sometimes fail us. Timely reading for the...
The inside dope on how polls work—and don’t work—from CBS’s News Director of Elections and Surveys.
When the phone rings and someone asks for your opinion on a political matter, writes Salvanto, kindly take the call and give an answer. Polls are imperfect measures, but perhaps less imperfect than we think—especially, writes the author, if we disagree with the result. They differ, of course, and they can be errant in giving an impression of certainty when they indicate only probability; think of all the polls showing that Donald Trump had no chance of winning the last election. There is a vast difference between certainty and possibility, and while a good poll will indicate a range of possibilities and not a single outcome, we dislike guesses. “The very idea of expressing things in probabilistic terms is to express uncertainty,” Salvanto writes, “but too often everyone just wants to express things in quite the opposite fashion: as either yes or no.” Of those yes-and-no matters, there are many. The author looks closely at polls of gun owners and other putatively single-issue voters to find many points of agreement (“background checks, to rule out criminals and terrorists, find nearly universal favor, in principle, because they take action against bad actors rather than the weapon”) but also extremely broad areas of disagreement that often devolve into hatred. Conservatives agree on many points with liberals, but they’ll tell you that liberals are evil all the same, and vice versa. Salvanto notes that polling indicates that those who are most committed to a political party are most likely to characterize their opponents as enemies, even as, say, conservatives step away from traditional Republican ideology to say that government should do more to help solve economic problems.
A revealing look at the numbers, how they’re derived and interpreted, and how they sometimes fail us. Timely reading for the coming midterm elections.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7483-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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