When I first read this book, I balked at some of the logic. Like "the Monty Hall Three-Door Dilemma". But she is right on. I modeled the problem with my new Borland C++ Compiler. My roommate, Mark, knew she was right and proved it with a deck of cards. Smart lady.. Good book.

This book is full of useful tricks to help one retain memory and become a better thinker. However, unlike many other books of its type, it is highly entertaining and full of amusement. There are tidbits of information that trivia buffs will find useful, but for the most part the book is a refresher course for everthing they taught you (or at least tried to teach you) in school. If you're even vaguely interested in improving your mind and want to learn all the stuff you found so boring in school, this book is a wonderful aid.

Even though the I.Q. contest that this book was written for is long over (the prize was awarded on July 31, 1986) it is still an interesting and informatve book.The text covers the distinction between I.Q. and intelligence, and the history of measurement. There is also a list of the estimated I.Q.'s of great historical figures (I "tied" with Newton, Rousseau, and Spinoza.) Plus, there is a introductory description of most of the high I.Q. societies in the world such as Mensa, Intertel, Triple Nine, The International Society for Philosophic Enquiry, The Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society. The contact addresses are also given should you decide to try for membership (I belong to two of them.) Lastly, the I.Q. quizes in the back are totally nondated and a good way to practice for the real thing.

Perhaps one of the reasons that this book holds up so well is that it was written by Marilyn Mach vos Savant (the most measurably intelligent person on earth.)

This is a good book.

First, it does what it says it does. The scores of exercises will pump up the mind. I was hoping for more of the "solve this type of problem and think this way" sort of thing-and there is alot of this. But whats included will give you a more "rounded-off" intellect. In some of the exercises you have to think of which compass direction you are pointed in and try to be aware of it-in others you have to solve a logic puzzle! I have yet to do all of the exercises. Some of them I probably wont do-because of the type of people I work around and the constraints of my environment there. And cryptograms must be some form of intellectual torture technique.

Second, the book gave me a good look at what the really smart folks think of intelligence. I have come to know that there are many facets of it and developing in all areas is important. The Nerd at school is possibly the intellectual equivalent of the corporate executive-they have just developed their intellects along different lines. One seemingly useful, the other seemingly annoying. Try to guess who falls into which category after reading the book!

Bye now {:?)

There are two books that come to mind that, though they do not fall in the realm of religious inspiration, are so thought-provoking that they are life changing. They are: 1. Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin and 2. Brain Building: Exercising Yourself Smarter, the latter of which I will comment on.

I purchased this book about 4 years ago when I was working a full-time job and going to graduate school to earn a Master of Education degree in Mathematics. The math courses suited me for the most part, since they pertained to both my major and my interests in working with numbers. The education courses, on the other hand, were intimidating, because I grew up with an inferiority complex about my abilities to perform in courses that demanded both extensive amounts of reading and the ability to comprehend several themes and passages.

It was during this period that, because I was going to school and working full-time simultaneously, on many days the only opportunities I had to study were either during my lunch hour or right after I arrived home late at night with thoughts of having to be back at work the next morning. Fortunately, it was also then that I was already enthralled enough with Marilyn's books and Parade column to buy this publication.

Among the several helpful suggestions Marilyn pointed out in this book is that when reading, do not hesitate to write your thoughts and opinions in the margins alongside key paragraphs and sentences. This particular approach, in a manner of speaking, places you on a more equal footing with the professor or author, and it is a valuable reminder that your interpretations and viewpoints are just as important as, if not more important than, the material you are trying to focus upon.

Despite my limited time and resources, this piece of advice helped me to participate adequately in classroom discussions. Except for a couple of B's, which I received before I even bought this book, I ended up graduating with A's in every course.

Thank you, God! And thank you, Marilyn!

I bought this book and completed it in less than a week - not 12 weeks. I think you will too. It is informative, insightful but most important of all: FUN to do the "Brain" exercises whilst learning about the brain(you). I bought it over 6 years ago and it still delights and haunts me.

Marilyn Vos Savant is known for her provocative articles in Parade Magazine and also gets publicity for her high IQ (a little too much publicity). But what really made her world famous was the reaction to her solution to a reader's question about a probability problem. Her answer was simple and direct but received the wrath and scorn of many mathematicians that thought she had blundered. This problem is now called the Monty Hall problem and discussion of it can be found in statistical journals and introductory textbooks. I use it in my elementary statistics classes to arouse the interest of my students.

This book is about the way that most people make decisions in their daily lives without logical thinking. Counterintuitive problems like the Monty Hall problem bring this home. Marilyn had confidence in her answer and stuck to her guns when many argued against her using only their degree credentials as support of their position.

Personally, I participated in the debate. When I read her article and saw my fellow mathematicians and statisticians condemning her, I wrote to her with an argument in her defense. Alas, she got so many letters that mine did not appear in her column. She seemed to delight in publishing more of the nasty critical letters than the ones in her defense. I guess she felt capable of defending herself inspite of her lack of an advanced degree in mathematics or statistics.

At this point I think she is milking it a bit as the same problem or a slight variation of it continues to show up in her column from time to time.

This book has a wonderful theme and it is played out in three parts, 1. how our mind plays tricks on us, 2. how numbers and statistics can mislead and 3. how politicians exploit our innocence. Many of the examples are not original and this terrritory, especially topic number 2., has been well covered by Huff and others dating back to 1954. But the coverage of US Presidential campaign of 1992 with all its distortions of economic data is new , interesting and thought provoking. That section alone is worth the price of the book.

Personally I bought it more for the detailed account of the history of the Monty Hall problem in her column and the even more interesting appendix "The Monty Hall Dilemma: To Switch or not Switch" by Donald Granberg. In addition to providing a rigorous account of the mathematical assumptions that lead to Marilyn's solution as teh correct one, Granberg did survey research to try to understand how people solve such problems and why they stick to erroneous solutions inspite of the excellent counter-arguments.

After a basic introduction to some logical fallacies such as the statistical implications of some drug tests, this book moves to the now famous Monty Hall problem. This seemed like a simple problem on the surface. On a game show you are given the choice of three doors behind one of which is a fabulous prize. You pick one and afterwards the host turns around one of the wrong door. Then he offers you to keep the door you originally chose or to change doors. Do you stay or change? This simple problem caused a great deal of controversy and numerous letters after Marilyn Vos Savant stated that it would be better to switch. Her explanation is here as well and letters from various scholars as to why she was wrong. Turns out, she was right.
With that background to catch your interest (and it does so very well) she then moves on to other topics and how statistics can be used to support just about any position. Of particular fascination are the ways in which our intuition leads us to one conclusion but logic and mathematics prove that conclusion to be wrong. As a good example, she covers politics and how the political engine uses our intuitional errors and statistics to prove both sides right!
I will have to say that she does a good job of explaining the problems and conclusions in a style that even someone who does not understand mathematics very well can still comprehend. There are several other books that cover similar topics and if you like this one then you might also try them. I loved Innumeracy and found it fascinating to read through.

Marilyn is rich, beautiful, talented, happily married, comfortably famous, and BRILLIANT! A lot of nasty, hateful people resent her because they're jealous and mean. I wish they'd quit resenting her success and just go work on their own fetid lives, instead of bashing this book. THIS BOOK IS GREAT! It is also fun. Marilyn knows a teacher can't be boring if she wants to keep her students. This book has all sorts of fun things that teach us how to build our brains. In one section, she has us look at a series of pretty paintings to detect differences in them -- enjoyable detective work that helps us learn how to pay attention to details. Another section urges us to eat an orange in a special way -- a sensory delight that helps us to expand awareness. Don't assume this is a boring math book, because it isn't. It is a lot of fun.

Overall, the book was excellent. Marilyn vos Savant answers various questions submitted by the public, and the book reprints articles from her column. I enjoyed the various chapters, which included categories of brain-teasers and mundane trivia. I was disappointed in her answer of why kamikaze pilots wore helmets--I expect that they wore it for similar reasons that they wore the rest of their uniform. :-) I'm still puzzling over why a 200 pound person couldn't juggle three one pound melons on a raft with a 202 pound capacity, given that juggling a single melon requires exertion of an extra pound of force--after all, when all melons are in the air, there is no force on the raft except the weight of the person, so as long as the melons remain aloft long enough for the raft to float back to equilibrium, I don't see why any number of melons couldn't be juggled. Ah well... it's good to have answers that keep me thinking. :-)

I love Marilyn but I have issues with this book. I think it puts too many demands on teenagers, in addition to the multitude of demands that they already feel. I think the book gives one the feeling that one is somewhat less than perfect if all of these things (one is supposed to have accomplished by the age of 18) are not completed. Also, many of the things require substantial funds to do!

I LOVED THIS BOOK!!

The format made the book enjoyable and easy to read. The "checklist" feature was interesting!

I wish my parents had this book when I was growing up! At age 30, I learned much from reading it.Though I have no children at this time, there were so many great items/goals I feel I can use right now for myself...it's never too late!

I loved that while there were goals that encouraged maturity, there were also a good balance of goals that stressed just being a kid and having fun! (This is so important today! As a teacher, I have seen too many students under pressure. If we lose our ability to have fun, we're missing out on an important part of our lives!)

While one reader felt the book put too much pressure on teenagers, I feel that it only serves to expand their horizons in life. It opens up many possibilities for children. Not EVERY goal has to be accomplished, but the book is a great starting point for raising well-rounded, socially -conscious children.

I know that I will be using it to some degree as a reference when I become a parent!!

I hope there's a sequel!

This book is outstanding and truly a "Classic!" I guess you shouldn't be surprised by the excellence of the information and advice in this book, because it's written by the smartest person in the world!

If your children or grandchildren experience just a few of the many activities listed, your life and theirs will be greatly enhanced! It certainly won't overwhelm them and put even more demands on them. Just take it a step at a time. You don't have to complete every activity immediately. Also, this book is very valuable for children to learn about practical and necessary skills for day-to-day living. It will allow them to become much more independent and grateful!

The beauty of this book is that it's designed for all kids and families, not just traditional families. And most of the skills and activities require little or no money.

My wife and I have two children (ages 10 and 8), and all of us are still enjoying the book after nine months of owning it. In fact, it's a book that you should reference consistently for a lifetime, it's that good!

Corey Dean Schmidt

PS: I agree with the previous reviewer on one thing: I love Marilyn too!

Here is an author who is said to have the highest IQ ever recorded. Why, then, did she waste her time writing this book? This book is also a waste of time for the reader. If you're a good speller, it has nothing to teach you. If you're a bad speller, it won't help you any more than all the rules you were taught in school but never learned. If you want to spell correctly, consult a dictionary or a good speller.

With Joan Reilly's illustration this lively, comprehensive & useful guide for spellers of all abilities takes a look at what our spelling reveals about our intelligence & personalities.

Marilyn vos Savant reconstitutes our turbulent history in spelling this language we call English, offering us insights about the use & misuse of spell-checkers - remember, computers won't know the difference between wave & waive or their & they're & she sketches some surprising portraits of all kinds of us spellers.

If spelling interests you in the least little bit, do give this book a go - you may very well find it a delight, I did! Do visit my site for my full review & editorials on the love of reading & writing!

The Art of Spelling by Marilyn Vos Savant is a book to be read not an exercise manual. It summarizes much of the advice found in other books on spelling improvement and includes such things as a list of the most frequently misspelled words but contains no drills. As close as one gets to the usual content of a self help book on spelling is a personality questionnaire.

Nearly half of the book is devoted to the psychology of good and bad spellers so it makes sense to determine if the reader has the characteristics of either of these groups.

Unlike many books on this topic, the author has not only read the best books on the topic but has interviewed the authors.

It certainly makes sense to interview the experts but I have rarely seen this strategy used as effectively as it is in this book.

Although she interviews the Anglo-Saxon scholar who the president of the Simplified Spelling Society, she misses the opportunity to address any of the real solutions to the spelling problem.

She does identify the problem as "phonetic irregularity" -- many words are not spelled the way they are pronounced.

She follows up this insight with a misleading quote from author Edna Furness (p.119) "Research in linguistics has shown that the English language is more phonetic than we realize (approximately 85%)."

All languages are 100% phonetic. It is the writing systems that try to record meaningful sounds that go astray.

There is some statistical regularity in English spelling. Four spelling patterns for the 12 elementary vowels will account for 75% of the vowel spellings in the dictionary. [See www.unifon.org/uu-18ways.html].

Most writing systems achieve a spelling predictability rating of over 85% but not the traditional one used to transcribe English. In English, knowing how to pronounce a word will enable someone to come up with not one but a half dozen orthographically correct spellings. Since each sound in English is spelled 14 different ways, narrowing the spelling of a particular pronunciation down to 6 alternatives is an accomplishment.

There may be an 85% chance that one of these six allowable spellings is correct -- i.e., matches the dictionary.

Knowing the basic code does help narrow the field and Vos Savant lists up to five of the most common spellings for 39 of the 40 or so sounds in English speech. She also provides some useful mnemonic devices for selecting the best alternative in the group.

Other practical advice includes how to use a spelling checker without being overly dependent on it.

This is a book that anyone with an interest in spelling will enjoy reading. Marilyn Vos Savant is a seasoned writer and it shows.

Marilyn should have quit while she was ahead (with the Monty Hall problem). If I were the person with the highest IQ in the world, I would have made sure that I understood at least the rudiments of mathematics and logic before writing a book about them.

For the time and money you will invest in reading about Fermat's last theorem, you can do a whole lot better than this book. I recommend Simon Singh's _Fermat's Engima_ (Bantam, 1998), a non-technical book that gives the reader a good overview of how the problem was approached by other mathematicians, and how it was finally proved by Andrew Wiles. _Fermat's Enigma_ does not require anything beyond a high school-level math background. Another good work is Amir Aczel's _Fermat's Last Theorem_ (Delacorte, 1997). Aczel takes the reader slightly deeper into the theoretical realm, but it too is a non-technical account.

Contrary to the review below, Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem did NOT involve the use of computers. Second, Marilyn vos Savant's purported insight that Wiles' proof can not be the same as Fermat's proof is rather innocuous. Again, if this observation is what entices the reader to pick up a book on Fermat's last theorem, try one of the other two titles which I recommended; both provide explanations of why Wiles' proof and Fermat's proof (if he truly had one) are not identical. Third, if Wiles' proof is correct, then he did indeed "solve" Fermat's last theorem. One should not confuse the NAME given to a theorem with the particular METHOD used to prove it. In this case, Wiles has proved Fermat's last theorem, even though he may not have reproduced Fermat's proof.

But my complaints with this book don't really have anything to do with the previous paragraph. Instead, Marilyn vos Savant's book has two significant shortcomings. First, the book spends very little time actually discussing _The World's Most Famous Math Problem_, contrary to what the title suggests. There is little meat on the bones, so to speak. Second, the story is not complete. At the time Marilyn vos Savant wrote this book, Wiles' proof was under review. A problem was later discovered in the proof and Wiles headed back to the drawing board, emerging with a corrected proof a few years later. None of this amazing drama is recounted in Marilyn vos Savant. For this reason, more than any other, I strongly encourage the interested reader to invest their valuable money and time in either Singh's book or Aczel's, but please, not this one.

I'll come straight out and say it. I liked this book. After reading the reviews below, I know this isn't a popular position to take. But it's true. This book was enjoyable.

However, it was short. At 76 pages, too short. And not even all of the pages were dedicated to Fermat's Last Theorem! How long should it have been? An article in Scientific American would have been perfect.

If you don't want to read the book, you should at least know her argument, and I think I could present it in a couple sentences or so. The story is as follows. Fermat left a theorem in the margin of a book that he said he could answer, but he did not leave the answer. He died, and nobody found the answer. A couple hundred years passed, other mathematicians were born and died, but still, nobody could find the answer. Then, not too long ago, some mathematicians got together and used a powerful computer to do some number crunching and, presto, solved Fermat's last theorem. Everybody went wild. But Marilyn did some thinking and wrote a book. In her book she argued that the mathematicians' solution could not have been Fermat's solution, since Fermat did not have a big powerful computer, but only a pencil and some paper. Thus, Marilyn argued, the mathematicians did not arrive at their answer the same way Fermat did, and so they didn't really "solve" Fermat's last theorem.

In other words, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and Fermat and the mathematicians skinned their cats differently. Just like you can get 9x9=81 by remembering it from a multiplication table, by counting nine rows of nine coins, or by holding up 10 fingers, putting the ninth one down, and counting the number of fingers to the left and then to the right of the ninth finger (a very cool trick I learned as a kid), so can you solve Fermat's Last Theorem in more than one way. All Marilyn is saying is that the way Fermat solved his last theorem, if he solved it at all, was not the way the mathematicians solved it.

What's so controversial about that?