LISNews: Librarian News

In the New York Times:
Book review of THE DRUNKARD’S WALK
How Randomness Rules Our Lives.

State lotteries, it’s sometimes said, are a tax on people who don’t understand mathematics. But there is no cause for anyone to feel smug. The brain, no matter how well schooled, is just plain bad at dealing with randomness and probability. Confronted with situations that require an intuitive grasp of the odds, even the best mathematicians and scientists can find themselves floundering.

Suppose you want to calculate the likelihood of tossing two coins and coming up with one head. The great 18th-century mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert thought the answer was obvious: there are three possibilities, zero, one or two heads. So the odds for any one of those happening must be one in three.

Read full review here.

Anne Applebaum's review of Nichoson Baker's book about World War II offers some good food for thought about the state of historical "research" in today's world and where we seem to be headed. Here is just one snippet. She compares Baker's book to The Da Vinci Code, saying they are both evidence of “the contemporary cult of the non-expert, or rather the anti-expert: the bloggers who assume that the ‘mainstream media’ is always wrong, the Wikipedia readers who think that a compilation of random anecdotes is always preferable to a learned study, and of course the college students who nowadays prefer to get their news in emails from friends because it is too bothersome to read a newspaper.”
Here's the link.

Book Review in the NYT of:
THE RETURN OF HISTORY AND THE END OF DREAMS

When Bill Clinton was in the twilight months of his presidency, he made a compelling case that by integrating China into the world economy we would gradually undercut the viability of its authoritarian government. It was only a matter of time, he told an audience of American and Chinese students in March 2000, before a Net-savvy, rising middle class would begin to demand its rights, because “when individuals have the power not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.”

Full review here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/books/review/Sanger-t.html?ref=books

"The belief that books aren’t “real” is exactly what keeps many kids from preferring to read, but while the first lady, Laura Bush, and daughter Jenna Bush are on target with their diagnosis in “Read All About It!” their course of recommended treatment is hard to follow, let alone swallow" says NYT reviewer Roger Sutton about this new title.

On the subject of "Read All About It" (oops, watch out, when you click this link you hear the authors speaking about their book)... Sutton asks "Whom is this book supposed to convince, and of what?" The main character, Tyrone Brown, (“professional student and class clown”) would say, (according to Sutton) "it’s not real. The point is laboriously made, the teachers’ names are dorky, the plot is hectic and the suspense and dialogue are artificial. What child today says “pesky”? (And anyone who has ever shelved books for minimum wage is likely to feel insulted by Tyrone’s aggrieved dismissal of the library: “All I will meet there are stinky pages.”)

Jenna's away on her honeymoon; maybe she won't get a chance to read the review.