The Book of Risks

An expert in statistical analysis, Laudan shows that numerous risk figures are the opposite of what we've been led to believe from media hype. His fascinating book offers a lighthearted look at the risks we face in everyday life—running the gamut from risks around the home to crime, hobbies, sports and disease. All figures are easy to understand and many are illustrated with clear graphs. Features 40 plus sidebars which provide extra tidbits of information.

"A number is sometimes worth a thousand pictures," Laudan--a specialist in philosophy of science, statistical inference, and experimental design, and president-elect of the American Philosophical Association--maintains. The Book of Risks has its share of pictures (mainly charts), but its focus is numbers: the odds, ratios, and percentages that define the relative risks of travel and nontravel accidents, infectious and chronic diseases and conditions, the spectrum of crimes and the wages of sin, nature's cruelty and technology's implacable force. When friends--or the media--insist that a particular behavior or substance is risky or safe, Laudan suggests asking, "Compared to what?" Where Bob Berger's Beating Murphy's Law used the author's fictionalized courtship and marriage as an object lesson in the process of assessing and managing risks, Laudan concentrates on the results of that process. "Too often," his introduction declares, "we end up preparing ourselves for the improbable risk while failing to take precautions against more likely ones." A more rational approach demands common sense plus the kind of perspective-granting facts about chance-taking that Laudan's Book of Risks supplies. Mary Carroll

Every day the media report on new dangers, ranging from ecological catastrophes to the health hazards of movie popcorn. Moreover, the hazards seem to change daily, and the advice we receive today apparently contradicts that given yesterday. The problem of evaluating risks intelligently is the subject of this book as well as Bob Berger's Beating Murphy's Law (LJ 10/1/94). However, unlike Berger, who uses a humorous format, Laudan (philosophy of science, Univ. of Hawaii) is much more serious. In the first chapter he decries the media's tendency to present every newly announced danger to health with screaming headlines and little or no indication of its relative risk. The rest of the book is essentially a listing of the statistical risk associated with almost everything one could possibly worry about, spiced with some "believe-it-or-not" type sidebars on historical disasters and similar topics. For popular science collections.
Harold D. Shane, Baruch Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.