Sharon McGrayne is a very good and engaging writer. She has an interesting story to tell about the last 250 years of Bayesian thinking, how the theory has developed, and its many applications including how to price insurance, how to aim artillery, how to break the Enigma code, who wrote The Federalist Papers, how to find Russian nuclear subs, how to estimate the probability of a shuttle disaster, when to do various cancer screenings, whether cigarette smoking is harmful, etc. She also has a great set of characters, a parade of statisticians who are more colorful than I could have imagined, from the pioneers of Bayes, Price and Laplace to most recent statisticians like Cornfield, Tukey and Mosteller.

But, the book is deeply flawed and disappointing because it does so little to actually explain Bayes Theorem, how it was applied, how it led to different confusions than frequentism, and how the two have recently been theoretically synthesized. Most of this is not very complicated, one knows a decent amount already, but it would be more interesting to understand hot it was applied. Instead, the book concentrates much more on personality and the more surface descriptions rather than dwelling deeper and working out at least a few examples in more detail, both more of the theory from first principals but also better understanding what data and calculations various of her protagonists were using. Absent that, the book is often literally superficial.

Still, the book has a lot of upside -- but given that there is not exactly a huge selection of books covering this ground (unlike, say, quantum mechanics) to have this as nearly the sole choice is disappointing.