This book consists of 42 anecdotes illustrating how statistical methods applied to data produce insight and solutions to the questions that the data were collected to answer. Real-life and sometimes artificial data are used to demonstrate the painless method and magic of statistics. Statistical jokes, puzzles and folktales are scattered throughout.

The vast majority of statistics books delineate techniques used to analyze collected data. The Joy of Statistics is not one of these books. It consists of a series of 42 "short stories", each illustrating how statistical methods applied to data produce insight and solutions to the questions the data were collected to answer. Real-life and sometimes artificial data are used to demonstrate the often painless method and magic of statistics. In addition, the text contains brief histories of the evolution of statistical methods and a number of brief biographies of the most famous statisticians of the 20th century. Sprinkled throughout are statistical jokes, puzzles and traditional stories. The levels of statistical texts span a spectrum, from elementary to introductory to application to theoretical to advanced mathematical.

This book explores a variety of statistical applications using graphs and plots, along with detailed and intuitive descriptions, and occasionally a bit of 10th grade mathematics. Examples of a few of the topics included among these "short stories" are pet ownership, gambling games such as roulette, blackjack and lotteries, as well as more serious subjects such as comparison of black/white infant mortality risk, infant birth weight and maternal age, estimation of coronary heart disease risk and racial differences in Hodgkin disease. The statistical descriptions of these topics are in many cases accompanied by easy to understand explanations labelled "How it Works."

This "treasury" of statistical anecdotes offers 41 engaging yet substantive examples of statistics and probability as found in real-life settings. One remarkable feature is the surprising range of everyday contexts from which Selvin draws material, turning now to a TV show, then to a legal case, and often to his own specialty of public health and epidemiology. Another attractive feature is that the text lucidly explains the subtle differences and implications of similar but different concepts: correlation and association, relative risk and odds ratio, to name a few...this book deserves welcome as a supplementary introduction to the discipline.