Review: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

The Drunkward's Walk is a good pop-statistics book. Unlike, say, Nate Silver's Signal/Noise book, this is actually popular statistics at its root. This would be a good reader for an AP statistics class. He explains things like probability, the origin of the normal curve (among others) and generally combines narrative, explanation, and good hypotheticals to take us from the Greek idealism of geometric shapes to the chaotic world we live in (where hurricanes are predicted using multifaceted models that are, in general, random).

He also (and this was boring for me, but probably super useful for everyone else) dips his foot in the well that is Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." At least one chapter is based in the "look how stupid humans are" category of writing, which is really what we need every once in a while.

This is a good refresher and it tells you about the history of some of the most important ideas we have. For example, the concept of "Expected Value" was invented by Blaise Pascal. The idea essentially killed him, as it brought into existence (and was brought into existence by) Pascal's Wager, which turned his sinner's life into one of apparent piety that caused him to wither away.