This is an odd book: from the cover, it looks fascinating; from the first few pages, it seems much duller than anticipated; but by the end, it's a fascinating and surprisingly entertaining journey.

There's actually a little bit for everyone here, which is both the book's blessing and curse. The history and applications of probability are very well-detailed, which by necessity entails that some topics and chapters will be more interesting to some than will others. (I, for instance, loved the chapter on Gambling, but found the Figuring chapter to be rough going.)

All told, though a bit inconsistent, it's a fairly entertaining and certainly enlightening, educational read.

Not much actual math beyond such basics as Pascal's triangle and Bayes's theorem. Long-winded discourses on such topics as gambling, insurance, and statistics.

The authors are unusually brother and sister, with training in history and classics, not math. They write very well, however, and seem very intelligent in their presentation. The book is organized around professional areas, medicine, law, economics, etc, describing the issues in probability and statistics for each one. Bayes theorem remains a difficult area for understanding. The calculation of risk should be by absolute frequency, not relative risk, because of the difficulty in understanding Bayes analyses. ( )

It's tough to make probability interesting and understandable. This book doesn't quite get the balance right, although there are lots of interesting parts to it. ( )