Not an economist? No matter. This book, whose full title is Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is written in clean, understandable prose accessible to those with previous knowledge of economics and without. Furthermore, co-authors Levitt and Dubner focus on the statistics of everyday life, not the more intangible world of interest rates. An original profile of Levitt’s new slant on his field, written by Dubner in 2003 for the New York Times Magazine, is sprinkled throughout the book, separating the chapters and serving as a rough organization for Levitt’s myriad topics.

Because Levitt does put statistical data into use to create correlations and causality in surprising situations, sometimes humorous, sometimes disquieting. He has no worldview to expound, no ideology–except, perhaps, that numbers can tell us far more than we think. He shows that fluctuating test scores may point to teachers cheating in order to get credit for their students’ higher grades, weighing it with cheating indicated in tournament records of sumo wrestlers. His chapter “What Makes a Perfect Parent?” examines precisely how much of a role the nurture of a child has in its potential success, with headings such as “Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool?” and “Eight things that make a child do better in school and eight that don’t.” Perhaps most controversially he links a drop in the crime rate to the legalization of abortion two decades prior. But whether you agree with his conclusions or you don’t, the facts he brings up and the connections he draws are sure to make you think about the world around you.

Read a review in the Wall Street Journal here; read one in the Intuitive Life Business Blog here.