When to Rob a Bank: …and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants

After the success of their first book, Freakonomics (William Morrow, 2005), Levitt and Dubner started a blog at freakonomics.com as a place for their readers to interact with them and to pose questions and offer, as the subtitle of this book states, "warped suggestions and well-intended rants." This book is a compilation of the best of those blog posts over the past 10 years. This book culls the best posts from the blog and puts the entries in one place, making them easy to browse and giving the authors a chance to update some of the posts with new information. Unfortunately, there isn't any methodical organization to the content and some of the topics are so old as to be irrelevant (for example, do readers really care that in 2006 Levitt predicted that Barack Obama would one day be president?). However, it's a great introduction for teens to the general idea of looking more deeply into assumptions about terrorism, cheating, endangered species, and the locavore movement, to name just a few. Levitt and Dubner's writing is breezy and often laugh-out-loud funny as well as thought provoking and eye-opening.