I had a four hour flight for the final leg home from Paris and decided to finally devote the time to reading this, as it's been on my shelf for a few years. I've liked all of Paulos's book that I've read, and this didn't disappoint. Less about numbers and math- oh, they're there, as they've been an integral part of his life, so not really much less - and more about parts of his life, it's also a look at biographies and autobiographies in general. Memory is tricky, and despite the courts' acceptance of it, eyewitness accounts are inherently flawed...even if it's yours. Some readers were thrown off by the less than linear flow and dinged Paulos...more's the pity, and I do pity them for their myopia. Oh, I'm on record more than once railing at incoherent stream-of-consciousness fictions, but while this is a story, there is still a logical transition between vignettes and semi-order to it.

So Paulos, at the age of 70 - he's older than I had in my head, despite reading him for nearly 30 years - sets out to collect some of his life observations and flesh them out to a larger examination of the life worth living. It's not a long book - 192 pages plus cites and an index, but there is a lot here. I'll just list the chapter titles and subtitles in case that prompts an interest.
1) Bully Teacher, Childhood Math: some early estimates, speculations
2) Bias, Biography, and Why We're All a Bit Far-out and Bizarre: bias mindsets, statistics and biography
3) Ambition vs. Nihilism: infinity, sets , and immortality
4) Life's Shifting Shapes: primitive math, life trajectories, and curve fitting
5) Moving Toward the Unexpected Middle: a few touchstone memories
6) Pivots - Past to Present: Kovalevsky, prediction, and my gramdmother's petty larceny
7) Romance Among the Trans-humans and us Cis-humans: roboromance and the end of biography
8) Chances Are the Chances Are: if only...probability and coincidences, good, bad, and ugly
9) Lives in the Era of Numbers and Networks: how many e-mails, where did we buy that- the quantified life
10) My Stock Loss, Hypocrisy, and A Card Trick: my stock loss and a few pitfalls of narrative logic
11) Biographies: Verstehen or Superficial: consciousness, biographies, and shmata
12) Trips, Memories, and Becoming Jaded: topology, travel, and a Thai taxi driver

A few of the many parts I marked and margin-noted...

The so-called conjunction fallacy, or Linda problem, suggests a related pitfall of just-so stories with little evidentiary value. [...]
As with the Texas sharpshooter foible, approaches to biography or even everyday storytelling that depend on the conjunction fallacy are quite common. It's interesting watching how some people effortlessly embroider, exaggerate, gerrymander, and invent details to concoct a compelling little anecdote out of the sparsest and most ordinary incidents. [this book was published in 2015...before Prince Twit-terer was promoted to King Twit-terer] Munchausen syndrome, whereby healthcare providers and/or patients exaggerate reports and add false details to obtain sympathy, attract attention, or portray themselves as heroes, is an extreme example. [see previous insert observation]
My predilection has usually been just the opposite. I find excessive enthusiasm suspect and often feel compelled to report neutral facts that undermine the tendentious slant of any story I read and thereby drain it of much of its. drama.

That last paragraph speaks to me. And sometimes I am labeled "negative" or "curmudgeon" for it. On observed moments in our lives:

I'll end with a common set of usually faux turning points: milestone multiples-of-ten birthdays, thirty, forty, fifty, and so on. To underline their artificiality and lessen the dread that often accompanies them, I sometimes point out to people that their age can be expressed less traumatically in a numeral system with a different base. Happy 40th Birthday, for example, becomes Happy 34th Birthday in a base-12 system...

I've mused and groused about artificial milestones many times! (...knowing full well the artificiality of "mile"stones!)
One part I won't detail here, for it's a bit long, demonstrated an interesting aspect of probability - something humans have a difficult time with, but I'll summarize: if one has two people with a tendency to not always tell the truth, the probability of them both telling a lie independently is easily calculated (after assuming some factors of truthiness). But...and this is important in 2017/18...particularly early October 2018, if the second person says something in support of something the first said, the probability that whatever that first person said is true goes way down! On mortality

Becoming a grandparent or simply getting older usually brings about a keener sense of mortality. Few unasked questions are more human than: How much longer do I have? How many more times will I travel here, eat there, do this or that thing I've enjoyed (or simply endured) doing?

To which I always add my question: "How many more books can I read?"

So, the non-linearity did not bother me, and the maths are always stimulating - even if I don't share his love of topology (Martin Gardner was another aficionado) or have ever really understood Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem - and I enjoyed the story, connected with many of the revelations, and found a few more books to add to my List.
Recommended. ( )