Book Review: SuperFreakonomics

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a thought provoking, fun book to read, I just found it much more drawn out and random than it needed to be. Freakonomics was very good and discussing the generation of insight from mountains of data, and explaining the process along the way. Superfreakonomics has a similar approach, but with much more information that is well outside the boundaries of what you'd expect. It's almost as if the authors go from A -> C -> D -> Q -> V -> to get to point B. It's not that I didn't enjoy the discussion of topics, it was just so round about and long, it was hard to remember why you started reading the chapter in the first place.

The opening chapter on prostitution talked at great lengths about the plight of women in society. The last chapter in the book spoke for pages on end about some particular methods on how we can combat global warming. It's not that these points wern't necessary, they did feed into the theme of the chapter, it was just more story telling and investigative reporting than talking more-so about data and what the data proved... which was much more what they did in Freakonomics, and what I enjoyed about that book so much more than this one.





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