Edward B. Burger

If you know what the word "agency" means with respect to your life, you're not going to get anything out of this book. Thankfully it's short, but what I wished I had known is that the last three pages are literally an entire recap of the important concepts in the book. Don't read this book, but if you do, just read the synopsis and save yourself an hour of wishy-washy advice for highschool students.

Early in a semester, I like to pose to my college algebra students:
Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
This is from the 2010 book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith E Stanovich. From the same book I suggest to the students that they apply “fully disjunctive reasoning”, a phrase I find is a koan-like tool for disruption of quick, reactive show more thought and nudging students into thinking of categories as a movement toward proof construction. During this time, we work in logic leaving strictly mathematical topics aside. Such exercises in critical thinking are also germane to this text and can be of benefit to students of mathematics, philosophy, engineering, and, well, life. The promotion line here is, “How you can become better at solving real-world problems by learning creative puzzle-solving skills.” […]

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Read this book in my college math class. It is very simplistic and some of the jokes are horrendous. But, for a math book, it is quite enjoyable. It points out all of the creative and enjoyable parts of mathematics rather than the scary algebraic and calculus-y parts.

This book was almost painful to read, not because it dealt with some pretty advanced mathematical concepts (it did), but because of the authors' writing style. To put it simply: there's nothing less funny than two mathematics professors who think they're hillarious. The book was full of puns and bad jokes that made reading this book more an exercise in follow through than a pleasure. If you're interested in probability, a much better book is Rosenthal's "Struck by Lightning".