I have been wanting to write this review for a long time now. I picked up this book from my favorite Tata Book House in Bangalore. (for an extra 10% discount and told the lady at the counter how much I liked the store and have been buying books from them for the past 10 years in spite of me working for the world’s biggest online book retailer).
Now about the book, I should say a very interesting read. A must read for information junkies, it provides numerous references to facts and correlates many of them. The main theme of the book is about asking interesting questions and trying to answer them with numbers and statistics. It is mostly analyzing tons to collected data and arriving at conclusions. And I should say in most his examples he makes a very interesting case for the way he munches these numbers to bring out the bottom line.
Here is one of the interesting questions:
Why do drug dealers still live with their moms ?
In most cases he talks how answers derived by conventional wisdom are not entirely correct and how numbers can be used to better answer such questions.
A fun read over all, easy writing style and is kind of gripping when you see it unfold and the way it defies common sense in many occasions.
Well if you are too lazy to read, then watch this author talk, the talk is very funny and nice, it is only 20 mins.
2 comments:
Tipping point is another such book that tries to trivialize the causes of some effects we observe in our day-to-day life.
hey sandeep. it is a cool idea to put the video along with the review. this book has just risen to top in my pile of to-read list.
Post a Comment