How to Live Dangerously: The Hazards of Helmets, the Benefits of Bacteria, and the Risks of Living Too Safe [Paperback]

Warwick Cairns (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 26, 2009

Afraid of flying?  Forty percent of Americans are. Yet you’d have to fly every day for the next 26,000 years to assure yourself of dying in a crash. A leisurely canoe ride is more than 100 times deadlier.

Think city streets are unsafe? You’re more likely to come to harm in your own home, where every year you stand a 1 in 650 chance of being injured by your bed, mattress, or pillows—and each year 800 Americans die in accidents involving soft furnishings.

We live in a world governed by fear, where packets of peanuts “may contain nuts” and children must be ever on the alert to "stranger danger." And yet, life expectancy has never been higher. Crime rates have plunged. Even unintentional injuries are down. So if we’re so safe, why are we so afraid?

How to Live Dangerously is a hilarious, straight-talking look at the things that terrify us. It considers life’s real risks, not to mention the often ridiculous methods we’ve contrived to keep ourselves “safe.” It encourages you to ignore fearmongers and embrace a new kind of freedom, in which we all worry a little less—and live a whole lot more.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cairns' droll, entertaining book examines how we've become a world of people afraid of the world: "survey after survey shows that most people, nowadays, believe the world to be a far more dangerous place now than it was in the past." Not only do we worry too much, we worry about the wrong things. With a witty, occasionally whiny British inflection, Cairns catalogs the innocuous things that grab our attention (airplane crashes), the real dangers we rarely consider (hundreds of thousands home gardening accidents), and the real victims: the children. Along with many funny, outrageous anecdotes illustrating a society whose members are no longer willing to take responsibility for their own safety or well being, Cairns makes many salient points about litigation, obese children and the pacifying effects of the safety state (ironically, the safest course of action may be the one that seems the most dangerous, since we become more cautious when we perceive danger). Cairn's lighthearted approach is informative and easy to read, in spite of occasionally obscure British references, and should briefly alleviate anxiety, if only because it's hard to worry and smile simultaneously.
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Review

“A brilliant and wickedly funny book.” —Peter Schweizer, New York Times bestselling author of Do as I Say (Not as I Do)

“Droll, entertaining [and] witty…. Cairn’s lighthearted approach is informative and easy to read… and should briefly alleviate anxiety, if only because it’s hard to worry and smile simultaneously.” —Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; First Edition edition (May 26, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312533896
• ISBN-13: 978-0312533892
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #722,666 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Warwick Cairns was born in 1962. He studied English at Yale under Harold Bloom, and has travelled in the deserts of Northern Kenya with legendary explorer Wilfred Thesiger and worked drilling wells on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota. He lives in Windsor, England with his wife and two daughters.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Are you annoyed by all the FEAR in our society?, September 26, 2009

By 

another believer - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Live Dangerously: The Hazards of Helmets, the Benefits of Bacteria, and the Risks of Living Too Safe (Paperback)

If so, you'll love this book. If not, you may have something to learn from this book.

I have really been struck by the amount of fear in our society these days. I blame the talking heads in politics, on TV, on talk radio, and online. Fear sells, it seems, and it's been a very popular tactic for selling political platforms, and a very popular tactic for marketing your "news" network against everyone else's. 24-7 fear in a gigantic echo chamber. Everyone barricades themselves and their children in the house. Stranger danger, swine flu, terrorism, and crime become the constant topics of conversation.

I can't HANDLE it sometimes. It drives me up a tree. Maybe it's because I served in the Army, and went to Iraq (twice) but I look around our country and for most people, it's virtual paradise. I just want to stand on a soapbox downtown and try to convince everyone it's OKAY. We live in one of the richest, healthiest, safest societies in human history. Crime rates have plummeted since the 70s - they are even down since the earlier part of this decade. We don't have to worry about plagues and infant mortality and hunting injuries and deadly parasites. A TINY percentage of our nation serves in uniform and can get sent to dangerous places. The rest of us? We're fine. The most dangerous thing any of us do on a regular basis is get in a car and hurtle down the road at 15 times our natural human speed. And no one gives a thought to that danger. Turn off the talking heads and FREE YOUR MIND.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good but not as deep as it could be, May 26, 2009

By 

Michael Lewyn (Forest Hills, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Live Dangerously: The Hazards of Helmets, the Benefits of Bacteria, and the Risks of Living Too Safe (Paperback)

In modern society, there is little correlation between the frequency of a serious risk and public concern about that risk. One-in-a-million risks such as abductions of children by strangers dramatically affect public behaviour, while people do far less to prevent equally lethal but far more common dangers such as car crashes and obesity. Why?

This book traces our misguided attitude towards risk to the dawn of humanity. To survive, a wild ape-man must worry first and foremost about the constant threat from predators. So people are predisposed to worry about sudden, violent, one-on-one disaster - a strategy that makes sense in a primitive world, where there is no way of learning about diseases or learning that some disasters are more common than others.

Our natural fear of disaster has spun out of control because of our saturation in television and similar media that relentlessly publicize disasters- especially the type of disasters that are easy to "put a human face on" (e.g. "stranger danger" stories involving an attractive victim and a perverted villian, or even the rare air crash).

So what? What's wrong with a little disproportionate fear of airline crashes or murderous madmen? Cairns argues that public ignorance of risks is harmful in two ways. First, if we focus on the wrong risks we may make life more rather than less dangerous. For example, if we drive Junior everywhere because we think the world is too dangerous to walk anywhere, we increase his risk of being killed in a car accident, as well as his risk of physical problems from lack of exercise. Second, the precautions we take in the name of safety don't always work. Cairns suggests, for example, that bicycle helmets may actually make biking more dangerous, because bikers behave more recklessly when wearing them, and drivers behave more recklessly around bikers with helmets.

Although Cairns' basic argument rings true, his book needs a bit more factual backup to be fully persuasive: more footnotes, more statistics, more thought about counterarguments (e.g. "Why does Junior need to play outside if he is in soccer league?"). This is a good book that could have been a great one.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Living in 'glass houses' benefits no one!, August 26, 2009

By 

Tom E. Laszewski "Reckless Abandon" (Hampton, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Live Dangerously: The Hazards of Helmets, the Benefits of Bacteria, and the Risks of Living Too Safe (Paperback)

Great book and something I could have wrote...I have been on this same 'soap box' for years now and no one will listen. Guess that is why there are not many reviews. This book should be a must read for all parents...although most of them would stop reading it and go back to Fox 'News' of CNN and continue to get freaked out by the world around them. Glad to see the child abduction statistics/information was pointed out.....this is so big a myth. And your information on hand sanitized was timely given the recent information about harmful bacteria in one brand of this product! All boils down to parents trying to control every aspect of their life and looking for happiness in all the wrong places....