By Brian Klass
Reviewed by Mel Raff
Thinking about how our lives unfold, we tend to focus on a relatively small number of key, pivotal events. But in Fluke, political scientist Brian Klaas explains how this over-simplifies and misrepresents the way our world actually works—with dire consequences. Contrary to our instinctive beliefs, cause and effect are never simple and easy to understand: any specific outcome is dependent not only on what appear to be the major events leading up to it, but also on an array of seemingly insignificant, arbitrary, easily overlooked factors, “flukes”—some under our control, but countless others not.