Six Smart Books: Tackling Money Issues

This week, the stock market closed above 10,000 for the first time in over a year, but is it time for investors to breathe a sigh of relief? Hmm. Maybe you shouldn’t spend that bonus money just yet.

Books addressing money issues are among those our editors and writers have chosen here. They include a study of how the rich really live, a follow-up to the bestselling Freakonomics, and advice on how to profit from the recent crash — and future ones. We’ve also got a short new novel from Philip Roth about a man’s loss of confidence, a collection of early stories from the late Kurt Vonnegut and a massive book on basketball from an ESPN.com writer.

SuperFreakonomics

By Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Reviewed by Alexandra Scaggs

Good news for free-market devotees: Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of the mega-popular Freakonomics, are back with "SuperFreakonomics."

And this time they’re bringing their dry wit to such hot-button issues as health care, terrorism and global warming from an economic perspective.

The book’s larger-than-life subjects include a prostitute making six figures, a society of money-exchanging monkeys and a group of self-actualized inventors seemingly sprung from the pages of an Ayn Rand novel. While the inventors task themselves with solving the globe’s problems one at a time, Levitt and Dubner provide hope that some of the world’s biggest challenges can be solved by old-fashioned, low-cost innovation.

They tackle the question of why so many doctors prescribe chemotherapy, and how one would measure doctor effectiveness. They also look at group-think and a 1964 New York Times article about Kitty Genovese, who was murdered as up to 38 people looked on. It turns out there’s more to that story, too. The authors use that tragic tale (and the article) to address -- and discredit -- extreme ideas of human behavior, including both apathy and altruism.

"SuperFreakonomics" provides a refreshingly logical look at some divisive political problems, with studies that encourage the reader to look beyond the surface and to question common wisdom.