“Life can make sense,” is the motto of this forthright little book, and all it takes is a little math. Shaffner, an executive in the computer industry, has taken a selection of the basic situations and decisions of day-to-day life and quantified them. The math is within the grasp of even the most number-shy: nothing more complex than percentages and division. Each short chapter addresses a basic question from everyday life: how much difference does staying in school make in a person’s income? What are the odds of getting caught speeding (or robbing a bank)? How much does it really cost to smoke cigarettes? In each chapter, Shaffner takes some raw data (e.g., the cost of a given federally funded project), and performs a simple calculation (division by the number of taxpayers) to arrive at the per-taxpayer cost of a given project, and then multiplies by the number of congressional representatives to show what it would cost if each of them were allowed one “pork barrel” project a year. Similar calculations are applied to everyday economics—for example to debunk the widely accepted principle that the top 20 percent of workers do 80 percent of the work or to show the necessity of middle management in large organizations (otherwise, top executives would have no time for their own jobs). Other chapters discuss fields where superficial logic often yields wrong results: simple calculation proves that even when 70 percent of the players at a “fair” gambling game are winners, the house still makes a tidy profit. Another shows how million-to-one “coincidences” can easily occur in a large enough sample. Written in lively style, with sly wit and plenty of examples from familiar areas of experience, the book offers an appealing mix of common sense and solid reasoning. Shines light into several interesting corners of everyday life, often with surprising results—and the numbers don’t lie.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-345-42631-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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