As a little light relief from ethics, social justice, well-being etc, I just finished The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow. This first came out in 2008 and is now in paperback, having achieved an endorsement from Stephen Hawking and bestseller status.

For those who have made it through any kind of econometrics course there is nothing new here, but it does have one of the clearest explanations of conditional probability I've come across. Ever struggled to explain the Monty Hall problem? Try the account here in Chapter 3. I'll be passing the book to son number 1 who has to complete his statistics A level this summer and get a grade A. This chapter and chapter 6 on false positives should be absolutely compulsory reading for anyone who practices medicine and has to understand and explain test results, and indeed for anyone who's a patient trying to make sense of the kind of probabiilities bandied about with diagnoses.

All this and highly readable, although not as hilarious as the blurb makes out: physicists seem to have a sense of humour not dissimilar to that of economists but we must acknowledge that normal people are different….

Here are reviews from the New York Times and The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal, all positive.