How to Take a Chance [Paperback]

Darrell Huff (Author), Irving Geis (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 173 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc (September 1964)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393002632
• ISBN-13: 978-0393002638
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,998,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic Little Gem, June 11, 2011

By 

britewindow - See all my reviews

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This review is from: How to Take a Chance (Hardcover)

This book changed the way I see the world, literally. I read it when I was a teen and I bought it again on Amazon to replace the copy I had lost long ago. It's every bit as surprising as I remembered. The author will tell you facts about odds and probability which will make you scratch your head and say, "I'll be darned", and sometimes slap your forehead and go, "of course!" Darrell Huff knows his subject, and Irving Geis' illustrations make everything clear in an amusing fashion. Readers who are interested in science, media, and politics will find the material relevant to today's topics, as well. Add this one to your bookshelf.

4.0 out of 5 stars Heavy-handed humor with probability, December 5, 2010

By 

David M. Gilbert (Manassas, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: How to Take a Chance (Paperback)

How To Take a Chance is faintly amusing, and fairly informative about probability. However, it is nowhere as fun as Huff's classic work, How To Lie With Statistics. Irving Geis does provide engaging cartoons, but I found the book overall more weighty than interesting. Evidence: I have only waded through it twice, while I have read How To Lie With Statistics more than a dozen times.

If you don't have a work on probability in your library (and want one), you might find Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide To Statistics a better work - the chapter on probability is well-done, and is nicely placed into the overall context of statistics. Another choice work is John Haigh's Taking Chances - however, if you're not English, you'll need to do a bit of conversion from pounds to dollars, and while the treatment is pretty comprehensive, it doesn't have the cartoon approach of either Huff or Gonick. On the other hand, Haigh lets you walk away with a pretty thorough idea of the true probabilities of winning in today's miscellaneous and chancey offerings.

In summary, I estimate the probability that you will find the purchase of Huff's book to have been worthwhile at about 50%.