How I Learned to Understand the World
A Memoir
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The moving, playful memoir of Hans Rosling, Swedish statistics mastermind, researcher extraordinaire and author of the global bestseller, Factfulness, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund
This is a book that contains very few numbers. Instead, it is about meeting people who have opened my eyes.
It was facts that helped him explain how the world works. But it was curiosity and commitment that made the late Hans Rosling, author of the bestselling book Factfulness with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, the most popular researcher of our time.
How I Learned to Understand the World is Hans Rosling’s own story of how he became a revolutionary thinker, and takes us from the swelter of an emergency clinic in Mozambique, to the World Economic Forum at Davos.
In collaboration with Swedish journalist Fanny Härgestam and translated by Dr Anna Paterson, Hans Rosling wrote his memoir with the same joy of storytelling that made a whole world listen when he spoke.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lively memoir, Rosling (Factfulness), the late Swedish physician and public health educator, details his ascent to becoming a medical doctor, professor of international health, and public educator. Rosling (1948 2017) tells of his medical school education, which included an eye-opening 1971 trip to India, during which his worldview that "the West was best and the rest would never catch up" was quickly dispelled by his highly prepared Indian classmates, whose university textbooks had been far more detailed than his own. In 1979 he began practicing in Mozambique and was thrown into the chaos of researching a crippling konzo epidemic, while also instituting disease-prevention best practices for the country's underserved communities. In 1998, his work took a new turn when he created a graph that used different-size, colorful "bubbles" to represent countries' population sizes, then superimposing them onto a traditional graph. Its success in giving organizations a way to make large datasets understandable to non-specialists inspired Rosling to create, along with his son and daughter-in-law, the Gapminder Foundation, which builds data-analysis tools. Much to Rosling's credit, the narrative remains accessible even as it travels through some complex statistical terrain. This deep dive into his impressive accomplishments will prove timely and engaging for healthcare professionals and anyone interested in health policy.
