I found this book to be quite interesting, but I found its writing tiresome and scattered. I would have given it 3 stars for writing and 4 stars for the wealth of information it presents.

The author chooses some very nice topics to discuss, but there seems to be little cohesion in how they are ordered and presented. For some topics he has an extensive historical introduction, and for a while you think that history might be the unifying approach in the book, but others are presented via personal anecdotes instead.

The best part of the book might be the way you finish reading it and are convinced of how random process are at work in so many parts of your life. Another good one is that you learn that there exist techniques for understanding estimation of the probability of things.

Maybe the most tiresome part of the book is the attempt at doing inline math in the text. You never know if the next paragraph will be narrative text or a verbose description of how to count something.

Better typesetting and visualization would have helped a lot. Nate Silver's book [b:The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't|13588394|The Signal and the Noise Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't|Nate Silver|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355058876s/13588394.jpg|19175796] had some presentation problems (see my review), but it was not lazy about good tabular material and putting the technical details into a separate flow from the narrative text.