Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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....