The Drunkard’s Walk

Physicist Leonard Mlodinow argues that chance shapes success and failure far more than people assume, and that the mind is badly equipped to recognize it. The title refers to a kind of random walk, a process in which values shift through a series of random steps. Mlodinow shows why wine ratings, school grades and political polls deserve less trust than they get, and suggests that Roger Maris may have been more lucky than great when he broke Babe Ruth's home run record. Along the way he introduces Bernoulli, Laplace and Pascal and ideas like the law of large numbers and regression to the mean. It became a New York Times bestseller and notable book.

For Readable founder Gabriel Coarna, its section on the Monty Hall problem changed how he thinks about probability and has shaped nearly every choice he has made since.