About the Author: Mlodinow was born in Chicago Illinois of parents who were both Holocaust survivors. His father had been a leader in the Jewish resistance under Nazi rule in his hometown in Poland and then spent more than a year in Buchenwald concentration camp. When Mlodinow was a child he had been interested in both mathematics and chemistry and was tutored in organic chemistry whilst at high school by a professor of the University of Illinois. His interest turned to physics whilst he was on break from University which he spent at a kibbutz. When having little to do in the evenings he read The Feyman Lectures on Physics which was the only book in English in the kibbutz library. He undertook extensive research in physics and developed a new type of perturbation theory for eigenvalue problems in quantum mechanics and pioneering work on the quantum theory for dielectric media.About the Book: The Guardian Book review provides the following insight to the randomness theory that permeates this book. 'A chance is what you take when you cannot calculate the odds. If the odds are in your favour, then in the long run, you'll win. What are the chances that you could flip a coin 10 million times and get heads every time? Very high, according to probability theory. Go on flipping and, over a period almost indistinguishable from eternity, you'd get myriad uninterrupted stretches of heads or tails. The catch is you'd never know whether you were in a stretch of 10 million consecutive wins or losses until after the event.That is the second lesson of this delightful book: risky ventures, long shots and random outcomes have a way of looking like good bets, but only after the event. Almost everything that happens in life is contingent upon a series of unconscious gambles: of turnings taken, of chance encounters and unconsidered choices - in short, the drunkard's walk of the title. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it was easy enough to track back to the warning signs and condemn the high command for not having read them correctly. But this was to impose a selected pattern on what - before the bombs began to fall - would have been a bewildering array of conflicting intelligence amassed over many months from listening posts around the globe. Pearl Harbor wasn't a random event - somebody planned it - but until it had happened, such an attack could have been predicted in many places, or not at all. The dilemma for all gamblers is: just because such a thing is probable, does that mean it is going to happen this time?'
The Review: Surprisingly the people that were thought may not like the book did- is this Mladilow's theory in action? One of the over riding conclusions is that it is dangerous to judge ability by short term events. Most events it is claimed seem random or may even appear to follow a pattern, this can be luck and not necessarily skill.
One of the examples given is that of the Maserati boss who was giving away a car and it behind some doors, he opened one of the doors and showed the booby prize. Mladilow claimed that the odds increased of selecting the correct door if the person guessing changed their original choice.
There was some interesting debate about what is predictable and what is though to have been foreseen when considering it from the retrospective position. Some of the group though the book did not quite do it! Two members of the group considered it to be a belief system that you either had faith in or you did not. This was apparent during the discussions. The book was not one you could pick and read sequentially, the chapters were not the development of a theory or a story - it was one that needed to be dipped in and out of. Although some of the annecdotes presented to represent a theory were believable and interesting to some but it left others cold.
The book on offer were:
Deadly Ambush - Raymond L Cox
Jo Nesbo - The Snowman
The Snow Geese - William Fienes
The Music Room - William Fiennes
The Man from Beijing - Henning Mankell
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