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Description of Panicology

Did you dare give your child the three-in-one MMR vaccine? Afraid you'll get so fat you'll die before your time? Worried that Tesco/Walmart will swallow up your local store, or will we all be hit by an asteroid first?

Every day, the press warns us of some new calamity that will threaten our lives. The risks of simply being alive apparently grow ever more alarming. Life has never been better yet we live in fear. Why do we work ourselves up into such a state? Because these stories are a heady mix of supposedly scientific information and journalistic hype. Our hearts fall for the 'story' and our heads believe the 'facts'.

Panicology will help you make sense of the jungle of threats. It will explain why things are seldom as bad as they're painted. Upbeat and optimistic in its world-view yet robust and sceptical in its analysis, it will equip you to approach the scares of today - and tomorrow - without panic, but with rational levelheadedness and perhaps a measure of insouciance. Panicology is a feel-good book about the oh-so-desperate state we're in.

Title Information

ISBN:

9780670917013

Pages:

304 pages

Format:

Hardback

Product Code:

265823

Publisher:

Viking

Published:

21/02/2008

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About Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Simon Briscoe has been Statistics Editor at The Financial Times since 1999.

In the 1980s he worked in the Central Statistical Office, the Treasury and the EU in Brussels, followed by 12 years in the research departments of three investment banks – finally as Managing Director of Research, at Nikko Europe, achieving top rankings in Institutional Investor and Extel surveys.

He was author of Interpreting the Economy, published in 2000 by Penguin, and Britain in Numbers, a statistical review of the UK and how figures are used in politics, published by Politico’s in 2005, and Harriman’s Financial Dictionary, 2007.

He has been on the Councils of the Royal Statistical Society and the Society of Business Economists and has chaired the Financial Statistics Users' Group and the Official Statistics Section of the RSS. He was a member of the ONS Statistics Advisory Committee and has been an adviser for the Treasury Committee (of the House of Commons). His latest book, written with Hugh Aldersey-Williams, is Panicology (2008).

He lives in north London with his wife and two children.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a writer and curator with interests ranging from science to architecture and design. His prolific career as a freelance journalist included a five-year stint as the design critic of the New Statesman.

He has written a number of books on design, as well as The Most Beautiful Molecule (1994), the story of the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of buckminsterfullerene, a molecular form of the element carbon.

More recently, he is the author of Findings: Hidden Stories in First-Hand Accounts of Scientific Discovery, and the curator of two exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Zoomorphic: New Animal Architecture and Touch Me: Design and Sensation.

He lives in Norfolk with his wife, son and two Maine coon cats.

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