Living with Risk
by British Medical Association Board of Science
Summary
The oddest book on this list is a committee's: a guide to risk produced by the British Medical Association's Board of Science in 1987, written to answer a problem its authors saw daily, that the public's fear of hazards had come loose from the actual numbers.
The method is comparison. The book assembles, in plain tables and plainer prose, the measured risks of the things people worry about and the things they do not: smoking against nuclear power, the drive to the airport against the flight, medical x rays, food additives, contraceptives, sports, occupations, the home itself, which turns out to be one of the more dangerous places most people spend time. Around the numbers it builds a patient education in how risk works, what a one in a million chance means across a population, why a dramatic hazard on the news displaces a larger boring one, why voluntary risks feel smaller than imposed ones, and how doctors and regulators should talk about all of it honestly.
Read now, it is a period piece in its examples, written between Chernobyl and the BSE crisis, and completely current in its argument, which the risk communication field has spent the decades since elaborating: people do not fear the things most likely to harm them, and public health depends on closing that gap.
It reads as what it is, a lucid reference book rather than a narrative.
Best for readers curious where the prize began, and for anyone who wants the case for numerate risk thinking stated early and clearly.
Historical Context & Significance
Living with Risk won the first Science Book Prize ever awarded, in 1988, which gives it a distinction no later book can claim and an asterisk no later book carries: the only winner in the prize's history written by a committee, the BMA's Board of Science, rather than an author with a name on the spine.
The Royal Society founded the prize that year to reward science writing for general readers, after long complaint that the form went unhonoured in Britain, and the choice of a public health reference book over narrative science says something about the founders' original idea of the job: usefulness first. Within three years, with Penrose and Gould winning, the prize had become what it stayed, an award for science as literature, and the first winner became a quiz question.
The book itself went through a Penguin paperback and out of print, but its project, comparative risk made public, runs straight to the risk communication units now common inside public health agencies.