Beyond Coincidence
Amazing Stories of Coincidence and the Mystery and Mathematics Behind Them
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Ever wonder what the odds are of being struck by lightning?
Or winning the lottery?
Or meeting someone from Timbuktu with the same middle name as you?
BEYOND COINCIDENCE recounts and analyzes over 200 amazing stories of synchronicity, the likes of:
Laura Buxton, age ten, releases a balloon from her back yard. It lands 140 miles away in the backyard of another Laura Buxton, also age ten.
Two sisters in Alabama decide, independently, to visit the other. En route, their identical jeeps collide and both sisters are killed.
A British cavalry officer was fighting in the last year of World War One when he was knocked off his horse by a flash of lightning. He was paralyzed from the waist down. The man moved to Vancouver, Canada where, six years later, while fishing in a river, lightning struck him again, paralyzing his right side. Two years later, he was sufficiently recovered to take walks in a local park when, in 1930, lightning sought him out again, this time permanently paralyzing him. He died soon after. Four years later, lightning destroyed his tomb.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although this book is filled with amusing (and not so amusing) anecdotes, there's remarkably little holding it together. The authors begin by attempting to provide some context for thinking about coincidences, but the arguments are both breathlessly superficial and disjointed, ranging from omens and oracles to the role of coincidence in literature, with a cursory discussion with British mathematician and skeptic Ian Stewart on why most coincidences aren't that surprising from a statistical perspective. The authors, London-based journalists, waver between fully discounting the stories they tell and finding them utterly mysterious. The authors write, "It is not possible to guarantee the absolute authenticity of every story in this book. Coincidence stories are often exaggerated, distorted and God help us invented." So what are we even talking about? Couple this with the fact that some of the anecdotes are simply interesting stories one explaining a stock market scam, for example that have nothing to do with coincidence, and readers are left with the impression that nothing mysterious is being discussed and certainly nothing is being analyzed.
