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WHAT THE LUCK?

THE SURPRISING ROLE OF CHANCE IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES

A welcome, widely applicable follow-up to the author’s equally useful first book.

Another delightful addition to the stuff-you-think-you-know-that’s-wrong genre, á la Freakonomics, Outliers, and The Black Swan.

Baseball players who have a good year usually do worse the following year, but bad players often improve. So the good players are slacking off, and the failures are trying harder, right? Wrong. It’s a mathematical law no different from the Pythagorean theorem. Everyone knows why brilliant men marry less-than-brilliant women, but why do brilliant women tend to choose less-intelligent men? Unlike Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Levitt, or Stephen Dubner, all of whom range over many topics, Smith (Economics/Pomona Coll.; Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, 2014, etc.) covers one big concept that almost everyone gets wrong: regression to the mean. Put simply, it means that for any action in which chance plays a role—e.g., taking a test, playing a game, running a business, governing, research—things even out. If you get an extreme result, the next result will probably drift toward the average. A distressing example: medical journals regularly publish studies of effective treatments that, once approved, don’t work as well (mammograms, antidepressants) and sometimes not at all (arthroscopic knee surgery). Eliminating chance from research is difficult. Journals prefer studies that find something. Scientists yearn for a breakthrough, so, if results aren’t impressive, they look again—and again. “If you torture the data long enough,” said British economist and author Ronald Coase, “it will confess.” Smith argues his case with more graphs, studies, examples, and math than necessary, and the end result may leave readers in despair—convinced that almost everyone, experts included, believes an important piece of nonsense and will continue to believe—unless they read this book.

A welcome, widely applicable follow-up to the author’s equally useful first book.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-4683-1375-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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