In the tradition of Peter Bernstein's (1993) Capital Ideas, David Salsburg's The Lady Tasting Tea is a delightful non-technical history of statistics. Salsburg tells of the bitter rivalry between the two fathers of statistics: Pearson and Fisher. We learn of William Gosset, who published groundbreaking research under the pen name Student. He had to because his employer, the Guinness Brewing Company, prohibited employees from publishing their work. We read about early use of the normal distribution, hypothesis testing, and goodness-of-fit tests. The author tells of the emerging Bayesian "heresy." The fascinating origins of extreme value theory are detailed. We learn about non-parametric statistical methods and much more.

This light, personality-focused treatment will appeal to all readers. You don't need to know any probability or statistics to enjoy the book. Indeed, it will teach you, at least intuitively, a tremendous amount of statistics as you read. Readers who will enjoy the book most are those who have some experience working with probability and statistics but are not experts. They will appreciate learning the stories behind the techniques they use. They will also enjoy discovering new topics in statistics with which they are not familiar.

I can't recommend this book highly enough.