This book is not the super-awesome, totally-in-your-facer that, like, "society" or whatever would like you to believe it is.

If pressed, I'd assign this book to a category I'd call "Books That People Who Love Malcolm Gladwell Might Also Enjoy." There's no doubt that Steven D. Levitt is an expert number-cruncher, organizer, and researcher. The conclusions with which he attempts to wow the reader, however, are specious, hyperbolic, and generally lame-o-zoid.*

Here's an example: The author explains a situation in which a parent will not permit their young child to go over to a friend's house because the child's friend's parents keep a gun in their home. The [first] parent, however, WILL allow their child to visit a DIFFERENT friend's house whose parents do NOT have a gun, but whose family has a swimming pool. The book then goes on to explain the statistics behind how many children die of gun deaths in this country in a given year versus how many children die in swimming pools in this country each year and determines that the [original] parent is not, according to the data, acting reasonably due to the fact that the likelihood of the child dying in a swimming pool far outweighs the likelihood of the child dying from a gun.

Now, there's a reason why, when we talk about gun-safety, we don't talk about swimming pools. It's because swimming pools, if you'd believe it, don't have anything to do with gun safety.** In fact, that entire statistic-set, while an interesting mental exercise, is really no help to the parent. The statistic, were I a parent, that I would be interested in learning is something like: Out of all of the situations involving children dying from gun wounds in this country in a given year, how many of those instances took place when the child was visiting a friends house? I don't know the answer to that, so, I'll just continue to be pleasantly outraged and move on to my next thought.

This book, at its root, is arguing that the things we take for granted, like, belief-wise, might not only not be the case, but the actual truth of the matter(s) might be completely and utterly counter-intuitive to what we feel to be right. I think that's a great message and I wish this was simply a thinking-outside-the-box appreciation book. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what the [nearly two page] epilogue is arguing. With that in mind, I whole-heartedly recommend this book's epilogue.

If, however, you're actually looking for a book to explain the hidden, counter-intuitive side to everything, like, for RIZZ, I'd recommend "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences" by John Allen Paulos.

BONUS THOUGHT: I should make it clear that I feel that the reason that "Freakonomics" is famous and "Innumeracy" is not famous, despite the fact that Mr. Paulos uses fewer pages to say more things more clearly, has to do with the fact that there is actual mathematics involved in the latter while the former just requires the reader to want to feel as though they're a smart person.

FIN

*But, some are for defs totes awes!

**I certainly understand the value in thinking abstractly about complicated questions as a way to expand one's mind/cognitive-like-sitch; it's the conclusion that I'm attacking here.