Superfreakanomics

I have in the past couple of week finished the Bin Ladens. I must admit I didn't read it all the way through in the assigned chronological order. It's a fascinating book, and very well-researched, but for me it was maybe a bit too well-researched. Steve Coll went into every detail that he could have possibly dug up about the past three generations of the Bin Laden family. It's an amazing feat and the book is a great source for information, but the very detailed and informative nature could get into the mundane at times. It would be a great source for any form of research however. The style reminded me a lot of Freedom at Midnight, the book I read on partition in conjunction with my Junior research paper. They both alternate between stories and narrations of facts and jump around in time a lot to propel the writing. They also have themed chapters that are organized in similar manners. 

The Bin Ladens contained an extraordinarily large amount of information to process, and I suppose I could have given my brain a break and followed it with fiction, but I'm really enjoying my non-fiction streak I've had the last few months. It's given me a lot of information on a lot of topics, and I thrive off of facts. I'm the kind of person who likes having a little bit of knowledge on any topic life can throw at me. My mom is also a statistician, so I'm used to having the world explained to me through numbers, trends, and other stats. Superfreakanomics is the follow up to Freakanomics, a book written by economists that connected seemingly unrelated phenomena and concepts using numbers. Each chapter has a different attention-grabbing title such as "How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?" or "Why should suicide bombers buy life-insurance?" The concept of the Freakanomics books is similar to Malcolm Gladwell's work, but I have a strong preference for these books. Gladwell attempts to make very over-arching universal lessons out of his conclusions he makes by viewing the world through an economist's lens, which bothers me. I think anyone who thinks they've made sense of the entire world that quickly is quite frankly full of crap. Plus his statements might be cool or shocking, but you can't apply any rule or conclusion to the whole world, life isn't that simple and neither are people. Superfreakanomics instead gives you food for thought, and is open-ended in the sense that it allows you to decide how you will interpret and use the information it provides.