The gritty and granular truth behind the wagers we make with our lives every single day - and, if we're unlucky, just once in a lifetime. 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. AUTHORS: Sheila Buff has written or developed eight national best sellers. She is an honors graduate of Washington Square College at New York University. Her husband and coauthor, Joe Buff holds a master's in mathematics from MIT and is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA). After a long Wall Street career, he became a best-selling novelist. SELLING POINTS: . Indulge your morbid curiosity: More than one thousand types of lethal risk described and quantified, with tips on how to protect yourself. From cancer and car accidents to shark attacks and asteroid strikes . A thought-provoking introduction explores the nature of risk: How do professional actuaries calculate it? How do practitioners in various fields, such as soldiers, doctors, and first responders, decide an acceptable level of risk? . Written with dry humour by a duo of seasoned authors, one of whom is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries . Combines the novelty and browsability of a Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook with the surprising insights of a Freakonomics