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December 2006
Compiled by Candice Michalik, of the Lynchburg Public Library, VA from contributions by the members of Fiction_L.

(To use this list in your library, book club, etc., please include the following credit line: "Compiled by the subscribers of the Fiction_L mailing list." This list may not be used for commercial purposes.)

Tim Harford   Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor--and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!

Chris Anderson   The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
Maybe not quite so perfect a match - (though I've heard some opinions that the book is padded and that all you really need to read is the original article.

Gilbert, Daniel   Stumbling on Happiness

Thomas Friedman   The World is Flat

Diamond, Jared   Collapse

Kidder, Tracy

Petrowski, Henry   The Evolution of Useful Things
Also writes stories that get behind the everyday

Rogers, Everett M.   Diffusion of Innovations
It's aimed toward a more academic audience than Freakonomics but it works pretty well as popular nonfiction. It's about ideas, and how they're spread between people-- very much like the Mavens chapter from The Tipping Point, actually.

Perkins, John   Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
I thought it was a fairly interesting look at how the World Bank operates, from an insider's perspective

Kurlansky, Mark   Salt: A World History
A wide variety of nonfiction micro-histories could be offered to these readers (Diamond by Matthew Hart, Rats by Robert Sullivan, or Mark Kurlanksy's Cod, etc.)

Galbraith, John Kenneth   The Economics of Innocent Fraud; The Affluent Society

Johnson, Steven   Ghost Maps
A new book that's getting compared to Gladwell's books.

Paulos, John Allen   A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

www.webrary.org/rs:flbklists/freakonomics_readalikes.html
First published on the Web: 12/14/2006
Last updated: 12/14/2006