Reviews
Interesting, as Freakonomics was, but very short. As with Freakonomics, consider this book more entertainment than academic and rigorous.
Contrarianism unbound by prior plausibility. Most chapters contain something wrong and/or harmful. e.g. the drunk-driving vs drunk-walking claim. https://www.americanscientist.org/art... I'm relatively fond of geoengineering, but their uncritical acceptance of Myhrvold's irreversible schtick is scary and foolish. A bit more reliable than Gladwell, but this isn't saying much.
Ridiculously flawed, stunningly entertaining.
I've written a long review about this book on my Blog in Portuguese.
Not quite as interesting or as compelling as their first book, but worth the time. There seems to be a fair amount of overlapping material with parts of "The Rational Optimist."
Love this kind of book: thought-provoking, questions things, bust myths. It doesn't delve deep, but it gets your brain juices flowing. Basic thing I got out of it: "in order to change the world, you first need to understand it."
Not as amazing as the first one, but tackling more interesting problems. If you listen to the Freakanomics podcast, most of this will be familiar.
great bang value e.g. monkey prostitution
SuperFreakonomics is an amusing book which should NOT be taken too seriously. As literature it is lightly written with a big degree of fresh humor and it makes excellent reading (I listened to it in my car and it's really easy to concentrate and follow the authors' line). It gives credit to Levitt and Dubner that they warn us against taking the book too seriously. Also, even in the introduction they mention that finding a unifying theme of the book might prove somewhat daunting task. The problem comes from people who'd try to take the book too seriously - as a recipe for what governments ought to do and how we can solve global warming with some very simple, cheap and even wackier solutions.
