Joe Buff

What are your chances of living through the next 24 hours? This week? This month? This decade? Will your job kill you? Your car kill you? Your spouse kill you? Will your own bad habits kill you? Or will a rogue asteroid just kill us all? Each time you lay your head on the pillow at night or set your feet on the floor come morning, you bet your life. Exactly what odds do you face 24/7? You Bet Your Life applies to you, the individual, the analytical approach insurance companies use to calculate risk: actuarial science. The result is a comprehensive, encyclopedic, real world assessment of more than 1,000 of the risks we take every day of our all-too-finite lives, from boarding an airplane to tempting a shark attack by dipping a toe in the ocean. You Bet Your Life is introduced by an authoritative essay explaining how professional actuaries calculate risk and how less objective entities—in government, finance, science, technology, and religion—apply their own competing calculi of risk and reward.

In his latest mission, Commander Jeffrey Fuller will go head-to-head against his most dangerous adversary yet - his own allies. Jeffrey Fuller has a new mission - use his cutting-edge submarine Challenger to recover a German spy claiming to have key information about the Berlin-Boer Axis, information that could be crucial to winning the war. Fuller will have to navigate his super-silent sub through some of the most densely patrolled waters in Europe if he hopes to accomplish his mission. But Fuller knows he can't trust the spy, code-named Zeno, an expert in electronic and information warfare. The man could be a double agent sent by the enemy to compromise Challenger. And when they finally recover the mysterious spy, he reveals that only by helping him infiltrate Israel can he hope to prevent an imminent Axis attack. Fuller is caught in a terrible dilemma - if the man is a double agent, he could be dooming Israel, but if he does nothing, the country could fall to the German assault. To go ahead with the plan would pitch Fuller against the best defences of his own allies, placing his crew in danger and possibly shattering bonds between nations. It is a battle that, if fought, Fuller will have to fight entirely on his own.