Here’s a sampling of the latest coverage:
Reviews
- Wall Street Journal: “Not only a book with mind-blowing ideas, innovative research, and quality investigative journalism, it’s also a story about creativity and what it takes to get the mindset to turn conventional concepts upside down.”
- The Telegraph: “Levitt and Dubner’s zeal for statistical anomalies is as undimmed as their eye for a good story.”
- BusinessWeek: “The strength of this book, as of the original, is in how it applies the time-tested tools of economics in unusual places to turn up surprising conclusions.”
- Hindustan Times: “Do read this book — even if you don’t take all its conclusions seriously.”
Features
- Portfolio took a peek inside Freakonomics, Inc.
- The St. Petersburg Times quizzed Dubner about “the book you can’t take home to mother.”
- Levitt let Newsweek in on a little secret: “If you get a college kid in a lab, you can get that student to do just about anything you want.”
- Talking to the Toronto Star, Dubner concedes that some people will see the prostitution chapter in SuperFreakonomics “as a sex story,” but that he sees it “more as a wage story — any time you can kind of explain the way wages move up and down, you’re learning a lot about society.”
- For those who missed Levitt and Dubner’s joint appearance at Symphony Space in New York, there’s this solid recap of the event.
And if you want to read an unabashed pan of the book, it’s hard to do better than this Guardian review, which says that SuperFreakonomics has “very little of the charm or the originality” of Freakonomics.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I just started reading your book and I…..
Oh wait…My Microsoft Windows 7 is here! Gotta go!….
I read the book in about 3 days, which is remarkable for me because I’m the participating father of a one-year-old. It’s terrific in all its subjects, but my favorite premise is that there is often a simple solution to almost every problem. We tend not to take a short minute to sit down and think before we act…the same way…that didn’t work in the first place.
Thank you both for another great work and a fun blog to read.
Impatiently awaiting my preordered copy from Amazon….it had better get here today. I have been reading all of the posts and critiques for the past few weeks and the only affect it is having on me is making me determined to read it in one sitting….
Yes, the Guardian guy nailed it. I bought the book (a bit expensive, don’t you think), I enjoyed parts of it, but much of it left me wanting.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704335904574495643459234318.html
Hey, guys, I vastly enjoyed your discussion of why walking drunk is more dangerous than driving, then I realized its problem. Comparing walking to driving is in a way an apples to oranges comparison. While true, if you walk or drive a mile it’s more dangerous to walk, I would guess drunks rarely walk a mile or drive less than five so, for each mile walked, a lot more are driven. My guess, it’s probably very nearly a wash when you take average distance traveled into account. That said, people freeze to death in Colorado walking home from bars after putting a little too much apres into their ski.
I unfortunately have to agree completely with the Guardian review. I think the original is far superior and groundbreaking. I remember reading Freakonomics and having my mind blown, but none of the stuff in SuperFreak really was that great. It definitely seems like there was far less Levitt and far more Dubner in this book. A lot of writing, but not much economic analysis.
The Guardian review was indeed interesting and made some good points, even if it was overly harsh. While I also found the first book more provocative and groudbreaking, it’s a hard act to follow up especially when a bunch of wannabes crowd in and jump your train before you can put the second one out. One thing to note for readers who have become much more attune to people’s incentives after reading Levitt and Dubner’s work: the reviewer is also hawking his own book, available for a mere 21 quid.