Numbers Don't Lie

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Vaclav Smil: Numbers Don't Lie (2020, Penguin Books, Limited, Viking)

384 pages

English language

Published Dec. 23, 2020 by Penguin Books, Limited, Viking.

ISBN:
978-0-241-45441-1
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4 stars (2 reviews)

Is flying dangerous? How much do the world's cows weigh? And what makes people happy?

From earth's nations and inhabitants, through the fuels and foods that energize them, to the transportation and inventions of our modern world - and how all of this affects the planet itself - in Numbers Don't Lie, Professor Vaclav Smil takes us on a fact-finding adventure, using surprising statistics and illuminating graphs to challenge lazy thinking.

Packed with 'Well-I-never-knew-that' information and with fascinating and unusual examples throughout, we find out how many people it took to build the Great Pyramid, that vaccination yields the best return on investment, and why electric cars aren't as great as we think (yet). There's a wonderful mix of science, history and wit, all in bite-sized chapters on a broad range of topics.

Urgent and essential, Numbers Don't Lie inspires readers to interrogate what they take to be true in …

2 editions

Essay collection

3 stars

Numbers Don't Lie is a collection of numerous short essays which were, mostly, first published in American magazine, IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. Covering a wide range of topics, the essays are crammed with a lot of information, but their brevity means that I never quite felt as though Smil had explored each of his ideas to a satisfactory depth. I was frequently left with a nagging sense that perhaps the crux of the matter had been left, unexamined, just out of the frame. Numbers in themselves don't lie, but their selection and presentation can easily be manipulated to prove pretty much any argument and I wondered what the major influences behind this work were. I would certainly question the two essays promoting increased cow's milk consumption as universally healthy for humans, and essays regarding the future of meat-eating actually seemed to contradict …

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4 stars