"Our scientific culture, and much of our public life, is based on trust in numbers. They are commonly accepted as the means to achieving objectivity in analysis, certainty in conclusions, and truth. Numbers tell us about the health of our society (as in the rates of occurrence of unwanted behavior), and they provide a demarcation between what is accepted as safe and what is believed to be dangerous. In Trust in Numbers, Theodore Porter ... unpacks this assumption and uses history to show how such a trust may sometimes be based less on the solidity of the numbers themselves than on the needs of expert and client communities. ... Porter is to be congratulated for showing how intimate can be the mixture of , real and pseudo-quantification, awareness and self-deception, and vision and fantasy, in the invocation of trust in numbers. His historical insights can provide the materials we need for a debate on quality in quantities, a debate which is long overdue."