Il Più Grande Bestseller di Tutti i Tempi (Con Questo Titolo) Come Difendersi da Chi ci Inganna con i Numeri by Sanne Blauw is one of the most promising new books by
Why? Well, our reality is mostly measured by graphis, numbers, statistics.
Are these numbers true, and when this fixation for statistics started to become so compulsively obsessive?
Not only: people, when interviewed by a researcher become a number. Nothing else.
Sanne was a researcher and her job was pretty satisfying, but one day she met a lady from Bolivia. She interviewed her. She asked to the lady questions about her quality of life, happiness and the result, at first a psychological one was shocking. When Sanne put numbers in order, hapiness 1, age 58, she noticed that nothing was in order. That lady she had just interviewed wasn't a number but a voiceless woman searching desperately for someone in grade of telling her story for a better end.
Sanne changed her job and she became a journalist searching for that "numbers", for putting people in the proper order, not, for once, numbers.
In this book anyway, she analyzes the fascination for statistics during these past centuries, taking in consideration people fixated with numbers, statistics; most of them also for a great purpose.
The first story is emblematic: the one of Florence Nightingale and the sanitary reform for helping soldiers. Thanks to her, soldiers received best food and places where they lived and slept did not lack as it happened in the past, of hygiene. Nightingale passed to the history because she was the first lady in love for statistics.
Archie Cochrane became famous for his numerous interviews for preventing heart attacks. His studies saved wagons of people.
Robert Yerkes interviewed potential new soldiers understanding that the level of intelligence of Americans wasn't so excellent. Americans were not so intelligents as thought before but not only: these studies and this results created predjudices and many more problems where possible because people started to discuss about "white" and "black" intelligence.
Not only: American presidential campaigns from the 1800s started to become a story of numbers with funny results as you will read.
Kinsey grew up in an obsessive family with the cult of religion. He didn't know anything of sex when a teen ager and substantially spent his time masturbating himself; later, still maybe under the influence of his traumatic past, became a mentor for couples in need of sexual advice. Kinsey organized courses for young couples teaching them the proper sexual behavior once married. His interviews with these couples were later critized and lived with vivid skepticism by colleagues of other eminent universities, Mosteller, Cochrane and Tukey. More than 520 questions, Kinsey interviewed his children (sic!) as well; one of the main lacks the fact that just some social groups represented the champion of people interviewed, leaving outside a large part of population.
Questions ingenerated falsity and people cheated the interviewer for fear of telling.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was for Schoenfeld and Ioannidis reason for a research on cancer and food.
40 of the 50 ingredients the researchers had taken in consideration in that book were considered potentially dangerous.
Just some example of what you will discover and find in this new interesting book exploring numbers, people, but also customs, traditions, fixations and a modality for putting in order, rationally, our reality thanks to numbers.
I highly recommend this reading.
I thank Garzanti for the copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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