Another charming example of the Malcolm Gladwell school of writing: making an implausible statement and then producing...
An amusing, entertaining effort to answer the unanswerable.
In his latest thought-provoking journey, journalist Poundstone (Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are so Easy to Look up, 2016, etc.) writes about how modern scientists have applied the mathematical theorem of obscure 18th-century British clergyman Thomas Bayes to a host of important questions and come up with unsettling answers. “By applying Thomas Bayes’ rules to the technique of self-sampling,” writes the author, “we can address cosmic mysteries. Was life on Earth probable or a rare accident? Why don’t we see any evidence of extraterrestrials? Is the world we see real or a simulation? Is the universe we observe all there is?” There is perhaps less than meets the eye because the results are always in probabilities, but many defy common sense, and the enthusiastic Poundstone delivers a steady stream of delicious jolts. Bayes’ theorem finds the probability of something if one knows other probabilities. Sound boring? Here’s an example: A woman learns that her mammogram is positive. What are the odds that she has breast cancer? The known probabilities are that 1 percent of women have breast cancer and that mammograms are 90 percent accurate. The startling answer: The odds are only about 1 in 9. Since the test is only 90 percent accurate, 10 percent of the 99 healthy women will also be positive. Poundstone turns up brilliant scientists who have applied Bayes’ theorem to unanswerable questions and then delivered answers. One determined that, with a 95 percent confidence level, the human race will survive at least 5,100 but not more than 7.8 million years.
Another charming example of the Malcolm Gladwell school of writing: making an implausible statement and then producing evidence that it’s true—maybe. Poundstone’s examples mix statistics and serious philosophical arguments, and readers who pay close attention will be rewarded.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-44070-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Add a new voice to the medical-literary essay genre: Holub is a Czech immunologist and poet, distinguished in both fields. In this first collection of short essays, he reveals a mind wise in the ways of the world, passionate in the pursuit of truth, and bitter at the fate of his country in WW II and the Russian aftermath. Each of the three main sections—``Angels of Disease,'' ``Troubles on Spaceship Earth'' and ``No''—is preceded by a short poem. These and poems found in selected essays set a dark tone to the volume: Life is a struggle, nature is never pure or benign, politics can be poisonous. Withal, there is a zest for science and pleasure in recounting his own discoveries about the transformation of white blood cells in their multiple roles in defending the body. That essay, ``The Discovery: An Autopsy,'' probes the nature of discovery in general, concluding that the term ``intuition'' does not do justice to the process by which ``something emerges that has been covered over and has remained beneath the surface, beneath consciousness.'' The volume starts with an arresting essay on the nature of health, asserting that it is not the ``absence of disease''; indeed, we who are alive today are the survivors of countless generations' combats with plagues and other morbid and mortal diseases. The final section is the most politically sensitive, concluding with an essay that stresses the importance of saying—or, more importantly, acting—``no'' in defiance of evil authority. Yes, there are lighter pieces—a charming essay on how Holub passed his medical qualifying exams by hypothesizing on how the Czech king Ladislaus died in the 15th century, and a wry commentary on minipigs, imported for laboratory use, that ended up as maxipigs that went to market. But overall, the essays are grave excursions on matters of life and death, truth and falsity, by one who has endured life in Eastern Europe and, because he is a scientist, retains a belief that progress is possible.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57131-217-X
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
Aging parents and a troubled, ne'er-do-well brother draw Brox home to the family farm in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, where she confronts an age-old dilemma: the conflict between familial duty and the need to live one's own life. Farming in contemporary New England is primarily an act of faith, much like the insistence of Brox's 83-year-old father on planting orchard saplings he'll never see bear fruit. Shunted to the margins of society, hemmed in by second-growth forest and sprawling suburbia, the family farm is further hamstrung by Sam, the surly, undependable scion whose cocaine abuse and erratic behavior jeopardize the operation's future. Into this generational vacuum steps Brox. With a poet's facility with language and an essayist's talent for finding significance in the quotidian, she forges compelling narrative from the workaday: short passages, rarely longer than five or six paragraphs, read like self-contained prose poems and create a cyclical, almost timeless chronology (it's unclear if she spends one season or more on the farm). Her lithe, lyrical descriptions of the seasonal variation of land and work- -demanding and bone-tiring in summer; insular and quietly contemplative in winter—pay gratifying tribute to a vanishing way of life. Though she perceptively and eloquently observes the natural and the man-made worlds (``Pollen clots the hand-dug pone''), she avoids examining closely the conflicts that divide her family. The subtext of their strained dinner conversation is the suppressed anger of arguments carefully avoided but unresolved. It comes as no shock when Brox decides she's not her brother's keeper, that her life lies beyond the farm. This slim book's surprising strength accrues line by line in Brox's keen observation and spare, poetic prose.
Pub Date: June 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-8070-6200-6
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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