SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance - Couverture souple

The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling over four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world. Now, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with SuperFreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first.

Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions, but the unexpected ones: What's more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it's so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary?

SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:

• How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?
• Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?
• How much good do car seats do?
• What's the best way to catch a terrorist?
• Did TV cause a rise in crime?
• What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?
• Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?
• Can eating kangaroo save the planet?
• Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?

Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically. By examining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is – good, bad, ugly, and, in the final analysis, super freaky.

Freakonomics has been imitated many times over – but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.

Steven Levitt has the most interesting mind in America, and reading Freakonomics is like going for a leisurely walk with him on a sunny summer day, as he waves his fingers in the air and turns everything you once thought to be true inside out. Prepare to be dazzled. --Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, The Tipping Point, and Blink on FREAKONOMICS

[Levitt and Dubner's] clever juxtapositions, the way they consistently mine illuminating truths by contrasting seemingly unrelated topics, is what makes Freakonomics a romp of a read. . . . Freakonomics is a splendid book, full of unlikely but arresting historical details that distinguish the authors from the run of pop social scientists. --New York Times on FREAKONOMICS

If Indiana Jones were an economist, he d be Steven Levitt. . . . Mr. Levitt is famous not as a master of dry technical arcana but as a maverick treasure hunter who relies for success on his wit, pluck and disregard for conventional wisdom. His genius is to take a seemingly meaningless set of numbers, ferret out the telltale pattern and recognize what it means . . . Freakonomics reads like a detective novel. . . . Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae. --Wall Street Journal on FREAKONOMICS