Heinz Kohler

HEINZ KOHLER was born in Berlin, Germany, where he grew up before and during World War II. By the war's end, he found himself in rural East Germany and spent years watching the Nazi tyranny give way to a Communist one. He made it to West Berlin before the Wall went up and came to the United States in the late 1950s. Since 1961, he was associated with Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he became the Willard Long Thorp Professor of Economics, taught Economics as well as Statistics and published numerous textbooks on both subjects. His most recent writings include SURFING A MAGICAL INTERNET, a series of books that show how people learned things 150 years ago before our internet existed, MY NAME WAS FIVE, a memoir of World War II, and CAUTION: SNAKE OIL! which shows how statistical thinking can help us expose misinformation about our health.

The SURFING A MAGICAL INTERNET series takes us back to a time, some 150 years ago, when the newly formed Liebig's Extract of Meat Company decided to advertise its product by rewarding loyal customers with gifts of colorful and beautiful picture cards. Each card was a work of art; no wonder the images and their associated commentary captivated and mesmerized people. Before long, thousands of these cards were circulating. They told fascinating stories about every conceivable aspect of life on earth and, as a group, similar to what the real internet might do in our time, came to embody the sum total of human knowledge. Collectors traveled the globe, met people from any country on earth, and learned about their customs. They visited lost civilizations, too, or viewed the world's natural wonders of the day. They studied plants or animals or the evolution of commerce and transport. They discovered the secrets of agriculture, forestry, and fishing or found out how new inventions were transforming industry. They familiarized themselves with music and literature, great art and architecture, with famous men and women of all ages, and, most importantly for children no doubt, with giants and dwarfs, elves and gnomes, riddles and fairy tales! In hindsight, strange as it may sound, the company's most important contribution was not to the kitchens of the world, but to the education of millions of people of all ages who could not go to school or afford books! The author's grandmother was one of these people and, many years later, when he was a child, she "googled" her large collection of Liebig cards to satisfy his urge to find out everything about the big wide world.

Book 1: EXTRAORDINARY BIRDS is the first volume of the series that resurrects grandmother's magical Internet. We meet the most beautiful, the fastest, the largest, and the most powerful birds in the world; we come across magnificent bird's nests unlike any we have ever known; we encounter birds that once carried the mail in peace and in war; we discover the role of birds in history; we marvel at amazing patterns of migrating birds in the sky; we learn of birds that can't fly at all and of birds inspiring poetry. We even go up in the sky and get a bird's eye view of the earth at a time long before airplanes and satellites existed. And that's not all. There are surprises on every page and there is fun for children of all ages. [Kindle edition since April 2014]

Book 2: BRAINTEASERS is a collection of all sorts of mental challenges that delighted children during my grandmother's youth. Over 150 pictures confront readers with riddles they can try to solve, illustrate proverbs they must identify, or depict scenes in which something is missing that they are urged to find. There are new conundrums on every page; even the book cover contains a mental challenge; can you see it? [Kindle edition since May 2014]

Book 3: UNUSUAL PLANTS presents over 100 pictures along with fascinating stories about all sorts of unusual plants that excited people during my grandmother's youth and are bound to do the same for us. We meet medicinal plants that may or may not heal people and others that would definitely poison them. We learn of plants that are the source of beautiful paints and dyes and of others that have long been celebrated in works of art. We study spice plants and carnivorous plants and find out how some plants came to be sacred plants. We visit night-blooming plants and nightshade plants and marvel at the world's most remarkable trees. We meet up with exotic food plants and encounter others still that manage to prosper in the driest of deserts or on the highest of mountains. And we come across intriguing stories about reeds and cane plants and all sorts of useful "industrial" plants that have supported a great variety of human endeavors for millennia. There are amazing stories associated with all of these. [Kindle edition since August 2014]

Book 4: REMARKABLE ANIMALS presents almost 150 pictures along with fascinating stories about all sorts of fascinating animals. We meet magnificent creatures from antediluvian times and travel through different geological eras; most of these animals roamed the earth long before humans did. We visit beautiful animals inhabiting the sea --- colorful anemones, corals, jellyfish and all sorts of luminescent beings that light up the undersea world, but are rarely seen. Back on firmer ground, we discover animals celebrated in works of art and others once considered sacred and even worshiped by people. We come across individual animals that have been immortalized by stories historians tell. We study strange mammals without teeth and beasts of burden that have supported human endeavors for millennia. We marvel at insects that are masters of camouflage and at colorful butterflies of the day or the night. We face poisonous snakes and animals living on the world's highest mountains. And we read intriguing stories about animals that lived among ancient gods who turned them into glimmering objects in the sky! [Kindle edition since March 2015.]

Book 5: WONDERS OF THE WORLD presents nearly 100 pictures and associated stories. Right away, we meet the "seven wonders of the ancient world" of which, sadly, only the great pyramids of Egypt survive. But we can still visit the wonders of our own world, natural and man-made. We stand in awe before powerful volcanoes and geysers, amazing rock formations, and strange bridges that nature has built. We marvel at the beauty of giant caves and magnificent waterfalls, follow the paths of explorers through narrow waterways between the world's oceans, enjoy the grandeur of fjords and the breathtaking splendor of mountain passes. We learn how people built seemingly impossible tunnels through the Alps, view colossal statues from ancient and modern times, inspect the ruins of lost cities and civilizations. Are nature's works longer lasting? We examine the question by looking at lights in our sky: the sun and the moon, comets, rainbows, mirages and more. [Kindle edition since August 2015.]

Book 6: THE WORLD'S GREATEST INVENTIONS presents 176 pictures and associated stories. They trace the history of civilization from the Stone Age right up to the early 1900s when the last one of these pictures was published. We watch how people learned to make fire, to harness flammable gases, and, finally, make electricity. We see how they managed to light up the night, using lamps at home and in the streets and lighthouses at the coast. We recognize the importance of fire in manufacturing, of the plow in agriculture, of weights and measures, clocks, money, writing, reading, printing, paper making, and musical instruments. We follow the history of medicine from outright quackery to later scientific approaches, of communications from bells and fire signals to the telegraph. We meet the steam engine, along with steamships and railway locomotives, which it spawned. We marvel at the fascinating story of the automobile (a windmill car drove in 1460) and of people taking to the air (the first balloon flight came in 1783, the first heavier-than-air plane, which used modern three-axis controls, flew in 1903. [Kindle edition since December 2015.]

Book 7 EXPLORING NORTHERN EUROPE presents 72 pictures and associated stories. They show what a person would have seen when traveling through Northern Europe a century or more ago. When joining that traveler to visit places like Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, some of which were not even independent countries at the time, the reader enters something like a time machine, which makes for an especially intriguing trip. Unlike the real thing, it is much less scary, too. In fact, in the process, readers can safely travel to an even more distant past and have fun by learning about a time when Norse gods ruled the world! [Kindle edition since March 2016.]

MY NAME WAS FIVE is a powerful tale of war and its aftermath that draws upon the author's experiences during World War II as well as later ones when he logged thousands of flight hours as a commercial pilot. As early readers put it, the book is "unflinching, stark and painfully compelling," "a psychological tour de force," "a haunting chronicle of war and its aftermath," and "a riveting child's-eye account of growing up in Germany under the Nazis and then the Russians; laced with extraordinary photos and posters from those times, it combines memory with testimony." [Paperback since 2010, Kindle edition since 2012]

CAUTION: SNAKE OIL! was inspired by the author's concern with the proper design and execution of observational studies and controlled experiments---both prone to many potential errors and abuses---and his eagerness to show how careful scientists can use these statistical procedures to find the truth about health-related claims and how the rest of us, properly equipped with a few statistical tools, can gain crucial insights from the daily flood of medical news, while escaping mere hype and outright lies. The book has been hailed as "one of the most impressive and eye-opening books about your health you will ever read" and as "finally a book that empowers its readers to navigate safely the minefield of conflicting and confusing medical claims." As other readers put it, "put this one high on your list; enter the world of evidence-based medicine; learn which stories to believe, which to take with a grain of salt, and which to discard without a second thought" and "an authoritative and fascinating book, beautifully written in a style to which we can all relate; a must-read for anyone seeking credible health information in print or online."

[Paperback since 2010, Kindle edition since 2012]