Thunderstruck by Eric Larson

Thunderstruck by Eric Larson

Marconi plays the mamba… But before his efforts were used to build this city (apparently on the backs of rock and roll), he was a slightly obsessed Italian inventor who caused quite a stir in England by experimenting with radio waves.

At the same time, a snake-oil salesman and his paramour are bouncing between London and the US Coast. Everyone gets caught up on a ship at sea… things unfold.

Interesting historical fiction unfolds, familiar if you’re familiar with Devil in the White City or Larson’s other works. Good stuff, weaving a tight line between history, education, crime, and storytelling.

Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Freakonomics has a subtitle: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

This subtitle is a bit misleading, but Levitt (who does the number crunching) and his author Dubner, who is a writer for the New York Times, do a good job of looking at a number of different social phenomena using economist’s methods and mindset. They mostly use complex statistical correlation tracking to draw conclusions from data on a variety of topics quite unrelated to what most people think of when they consider the dismal science.

They tackle Sumo Wrestling (it’s rigged), teacher cheating to improve student performance on standardized tests (they do), the pyramid scheme of Chicago crack dealing, the correlations between infant name selection and socio-economics, and most controversially, the relationship between the passage of Roe v. Wade and a drop in crime rates.

Of course, economics is really little more than a set of theories to interpret data which is based on statistics, so it applies nicely to these sorts of topics.

Levitt and Dubner are interesting, convincing, and the book is certainly written for the layman. No background in math, statistics, social theory, or economics? No problem. Just let the boys explain a few basic principles for you, then sit back and be dazzled by their factoids.

The book is delightful, fast to read, and will encourage you to think, however briefly, about the world in a slightly different way. And that’s never a bad thing.

Thanks to Tucker for loaning me this one.