Skip to content
  • home
  • highlights
  • browse by topic
    • all nonfiction
    • fantasy
    • graphic novels
    • historical fiction
    • history
    • horror
    • literature
    • middle grade
    • mystery
    • philosophy
    • picture books
    • psychology
    • queer
    • science & nature
    • science fiction
    • suspense
    • romance
    • young adult
  • my own books
  • contact me

Hello and welcome! My name is Emma and I've been a bookseller for over a decade. I also write fantasy under the name E. M. Epps. This blog features my Two-Paragraph Book Reviews. One paragraph from me. One from the book. Here's why I keep it short.

You are here: Home > Review: “SuperFreakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

Review: “SuperFreakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Image Emma 26 April 2010

Thumbs up for SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Science/nature.

Okay, okay, pop statistics books are a weakness of mine. I admit it. But Freakonomics was just so dang much fun. And so was this one. Though it should all be taken with a grain of salt – it is statistics, right? And as Levitt and Dubner point out, you can’t always trust ’em. Which does not stop them from writing books, or me from reading them.

“But the scientific community is also at fault. The current generation of climate-prediction models are, as Lowell Wood puts it, ‘enormously crude.’ Wood is a heavyset and spectacularly talkative astrophysicist in his sixties who calls to mind a sane Ignatius P. Reilly. Long ago, Wood was Myhrvold’s academic mentor. (Wood himself was a protégé of the physicist Edward Teller.) Myhrvold thinks Wood is one the smartest men in the universe. Off the top of his head, Wood seems to know quite a bit about practically anything: the melt rate of the Greenland ice core (80 cubic kilometers per year); the percentage of unsanctioned Chinese power plants that went online in the previous year (about 20 percent); the number of times that metastatic cancer cells travel through the bloodstream before they land (‘as many as a million’).”


If you enjoyed this post, please share it!
Posted in book review
Tagged nonfiction, science/nature, thumbs up
Previous Post: Review: “After You With the Pistol” by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Next Post: Review: “Napoleon’s Buttons” by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson

Secondary Sidebar

Search the reviews….

Disclosure

My bookstore is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, so we will earn a commission if you click through my links and make a purchase. I, personally, am also an affiliate of the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and will likewise make a commission if you click through those links and make a purchase. Having to use Amazon doesn’t fill me with joy, but they’re the only good affiliate program for used books available right now. So…that’s the way it is.

Copyright © 2023. Proudly Powered by WordPress & Inception Theme