The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow

Okay, I confess. I'm one of those people who can be attracted to a book merely because of its title (or subtitle), and this was how I was drawn into reading The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow. For something with a catchy title, this book ended up being very cerebral, since it's about the mathematical theory of randomness and the effects of chance just about everywhere.

The author has the best professor's voice I've read in a long time, simply because it's genial and conversational, even when he gets into the technical stuff with the numbers and calculations, and how people draw or don't draw conclusions from these equations or those test results. The text is also interspersed with graphs, and he had a small section at the beginning about how people only pay half attention when reading graphs (because it's ultimately a picture) and that could lead to them being fooled by data.

Roughly, the first four chapters are spent proving that many or most aspects of human life are governed by randomness. I generally think of myself as open to change, but my reaction to these chapters proved that that wasn't completely true, because I was downright discomfited. If almost everything is governed by chance, then does ability mean nothing? And does that mean that I have absolutely no control over my life? (I eventually comforted myself with the thought that, even if that were true, luck has carried me this far in my less than two-and-a-half decades of life.) If the reader doesn't stop reading right there because he feels that it's sacrilegious or reject it as utter nonsense, it may tell you something about his character.

Speaking of which, it's not all about math or statistics. He also goes into the psychology of our intuitive decisions, and why that process is not always logical. The most striking chapter to me was the one about how success is judged by the results all too often, and that is largely faulty because then we don't consider the coincidental factors that could have led to any individual's success or failure. All the academic and scary psychological stuff is peppered with Mlodinow's gently self deprecating humor, where he jokes about the chances of success his book has. He also has several tidbits about the role chance played in his own life, which makes him infinitely more relate-able.