Who’s Counting: Uniting Numbers and Narratives with Stories from Pop Culture, Puzzles, Politics and More

Paulos (Innumeracy), a professor of math at Temple University, comes up short in this somewhat dusty treatise on why “numbers, probabilities, and logic are, along with a humble respect for truth, our most basic and reliable guides to reality.” He proposes some puzzles for would-be presidents to attempt (to winnow down the candidates), breaks down probability with the help of baseball cards, and considers the conjunction fallacy, or “the tendency we have to attribute plausibility to scenarios with many extraneous details.” However, the book is largely a collection of columns Paulos wrote between 2000 and 2010 for ABC News, along with excerpts from some of his other books, including Irreligion (published in 2008), and the dated material feels, well, dated. Paulos writes that his source material is “still informative despite superficial anachronisms that I beg the reader to ignore,” but the 20-year-old references to George W. Bush and Al Gore’s economic debates and 2003’s Total Information Awareness program tend to stick out. As well, several sections feel like fluff, such as a hypothetical conversation between Groucho Marx and Bertrand Russell and an instant message exchange with God. This one doesn’t add up to much. (Sept.)