On May 19, 2001, 26 men crossed the border from Mexico into the searing desert of southern Arizona. They intended to find work as orange pickers. By the time the U.S. Border Patrol found the group strewn across the landscape four days later, 14 were dead from the heat. In his powerful new book, The Devil's Highway, author Luis Alberto Urrea introduces the principal players in this tragedy the illegal walkers, the smugglers who misled them and the goal-conflicted Border Patrol and takes readers on a harrowing journey from the streets of Veracruz to a morgue in Arizona.

There have been worse border tragedies since, but this one loomed large at the time, both because of the number of men who died and the embarrassment it caused both nations. "It was the largest manhunt in Border Patrol history," Urrea tells BookPage from his home in Naperville, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. "It was a historic event. I think it was exacerbated by the fact that the survivors turned around and sued the United States. It would have led to some serious border changes if 9/11 hadn't happened."

The most harrowing segment of the book is Urrea's step-by-step account of the effect on the men's bodies as the sun relentlessly drains them of all moisture. "I had no idea how bad it was," he says. "I guess I thought you die of thirst. I was always thinking of those desert movies, like The Flight of the Phoenix, where Jimmy Stewart is walking around with chapped lips. I didn't really think about what happens to your body. That came from seeing the actual death pictures. When you go in those archives, they've got a baggie—a Ziploc baggie where they put whatever the guy was carrying when he died. So their files still smell like rotting flesh. When you're looking at the pictures of their autopsies, you're smelling their bodies at the same time. It's just overwhelming to realize how those guys suffered and how crazy some of them were when they died [like] trying to bury themselves. One guy was naked and had tried to swim in the dirt."

It was not the magnitude of tragedy, however, that got Urrea involved. "It actually began with my editor at Little, Brown, Geoff Shandler," a native of New Mexico who had read all of Urrea's books and thought the story might interest him. "He asked me if I wanted to look into it and see if there was something to write about. Of course, there was." Already an acclaimed poet, short story writer and essayist, Urrea says the yearlong project called for a major shift in his approach to writing. "I wasn't used to doing narrative investigative reporting. All I could think to do was actually go there and just try to get in places. That's how it worked out and partially why it took so long."

This is not a political book at least not in the sense of taking sides or calling for a particular action. What it does is personalize human misery on so vast a scale that it is usually portrayed exclusively in statistics. There is plenty of blame to go around. "The frustration in the [American] field," says Urrea, "is that [the Border Patrol] realizes that they are puppets. All of the interdiction stuff is not really sincere. I got several eye-opening examples of their being ordered not to do anything [but] 'just let them in.' I was actually shown by an ABC Radio guy a letter that they had given him from Washington, telling the Border Patrol that there was a shortage of pickers in the Imperial Valley [of California] and that they had to hold off interdiction for a certain number of days."

For its part, Urrea continues, Mexico is choking under "a huge foreign debt it can't repay and its own corruption. It's very beneficial to Mexico that these workers [come to the U. S.]. It relieves a lot of social tension. It empties out the countryside of the poor and the needy. It stops revolution from happening. And it's sending back a tidal wave of money. The remittance money from the United States is the second or third largest source of income in Mexico now. I guess you could argue that we have an extremely generous foreign policy. It's just being filtered through McDonald's."

John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels bears a striking resemblance to a certain 1994 nonfiction debut you might have heard of: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Writing about Venice this time around, Berendt reprises so many elements from his runaway bestseller which sold 2.5 million hardcover copies and spent a record four years on the New York Times bestseller list that one might suspect him of pandering to his worldwide following. Of course, had the author truly intended to cash in on his success, he certainly wouldn't have waited a decade to do so; instead, we would have been inundated long ago with the likes of Dawn at a Strip Club on Bourbon Street, Snack Time at the Varsity Drive-In in Atlanta and Twilight at a Convenience Store in Paramus.

Easygoing and gregarious during a conversation from his home in Manhattan, Berendt fills us in on the decade it took him to steep in the atmosphere of Venice and commit what he'd learned to paper. The steeping took more than four years living in Venice 30 percent of the time; the writing dragged on for another five.

"I have to experience them," he admits of his favored locales. "It's not that I'm slow-witted, although maybe I am, but it takes me a while to get into it, to understand the contours of the story and to feel what is to be felt. Then again, when I write, I am a torturously slow writer. What I do is I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and I don't move on to the next paragraph until I'm reasonably happy with the first one, then when I reach the end of a chapter, I go back and look at the whole thing over again." After completing his media tours for Midnight, an afterglow that lasted two full years, Berendt set about in earnest to find a worthy follow-up project. "I looked at a couple of stories that didn't pan out, so I backed up a little bit and said, let's look at the elements that worked in the first book: number one, remarkable characters; number two: a marvelous sense of place. Savannah was this wonderful, magical place, and I thought, what other place is so terrific? And I thought immediately of Venice." Over the years, Berendt had become quite familiar with Venice. What he could not have foreseen was that three days before his arrival, the famed Fenice (feh-NEE-chay) Opera House would burn to the ground, providing the third element in the equation a true-life mystery to drive the narrative.

Just as Midnight involved the interplay of zany Savannah locals set against the backdrop of a scandalous midnight shooting and subsequent trial, The City of Falling Angels explores equally colorful Venetians as they react to the loss and rebuilding of the city's last opera house, and a trial of the torch men that could only happen in Italy. From the opening line ("Everyone in Venice is acting"), it's clear that Berendt, like Shakespeare, views the world as a stage. The cavalcade of characters that pour forth from these pages is truly impressive Ezra Pound's mistress Olga; the Rat Man who shreds plastic into his bait to simulate the flavor of fast food; special-ops pigeon exterminators; a sleepwalker who dresses in uniforms; a master glassblower who takes inspiration from the Fenice blaze; and sordid and sundry expats who love a place they'll never call home. Life's rich pageant, served with prosciutto, formaggio e prosecco.

If at times these characters seem tangential to the plot, it's by design. As in Midnight, the slow workings of the wheels of justice ultimately give way to the far more interesting eccentricities of the bit players.

"I wasn't really writing about Venice so much as the people who live there," Berendt says. "Maybe it has reached the point where you can't make too many new observations about Venice, but people never wear out; there are always new people, new characters, new stories. I knew I was going to have a fresh look at Venice." Berendt, a cum laude Harvard graduate, already had a successful career behind him as an editor with Esquire and New York magazine when he jumped into book-length nonfiction with Midnight. "I noticed that all my magazine pieces were thrown away in a month or two because that's what you do with magazines, so I've got nothing to show for this. That was really my motivation for writing the book; I wanted to have a calling card when I meet somebody," he recalls.

Throughout the '60s and '70s, he worked with the best of the New Journalists Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Gay Talese and learned from them how to use fiction techniques to create hyper-real nonfiction. "I really just thought that's the only way to write nonfiction," he says. "Whenever I've written nonfiction, I've taken that approach because it came naturally to me." Given that Berendt's favorite fiction writers included Southern literary heroes Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, it was perhaps preordained that this Syracuse, New York, native would craft the bona fide Southern classic of New Journalism in Midnight.

Berendt is well prepared to parry the inevitable question he'll be peppered with as he circles the globe to promote his second book: when will we see a third? "I say to readers, you've got a lot of other things that you should be reading. I'll bring out a book when I'm ready. You don't really need my book, but if you're going to read my next book, I would think you would want it to be the best I can do, so you're just going to have to wait." Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

Urged on by pleas from middle-class readers of her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich launched a new book project that she hoped would do for white-collar work what Nickel and Dimed had done for low-wage work. In Nickel and Dimed, which has remained a bestseller since its publication four years ago, Ehrenreich posed as an unskilled, recently divorced homemaker, took a series of minimum-wage jobs, and then wrote an insightful, morally outraged portrait of the lives of low-wage workers.

For Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, her second foray into "immersion journalism," Ehrenreich sought a job in the corporate world as a public relations professional – not a huge stretch for someone who has published thousands of articles and a dozen nonfiction books. Her plan was to find a job that paid $50,000 a year and offered health benefits and then write about her experiences as a white-collar worker in corporate America. A problem soon developed, however: Ehrenreich had an almost impossible time finding a job.

"I was shocked," Ehrenreich says during a call to her home in Charlottesville, Virginia. "I expected to go to work somewhere and I really thought that would be the most interesting part of the project. Now I realize that that was unrealistic, because I was meeting so many people who had been out of work for more than a year."

Bait and Switch soon morphed into a book about white-collar unemployment and the peculiar "transition industry" that has emerged to assist the job searches of employees cast off by American corporations in the growing trend toward "delayering" (getting rid of middle management). With the same rueful wit, passion and skepticism she brought to Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich here relates her sometimes-comic, often exasperating experiences with career coaches, résumé consultants, networking events, personality tests and job fairs.

Among the most amusing and chilling of these is an account of her makeover. "Oh, my makeover," Ehrenreich says with a laugh that quickly turns into a sigh. "I had naively imagined at the beginning that the way I dressed to give a lecture at a college would be all right for an interview. But, no, there’s an entirely different way of dressing for success. So I decided to pay for a face-to-face encounter. I was wearing a very conservative brooch. It was silver and circular. But I was told by my makeover guy that it shouldn’t have been circular; it should have been a swoosh. But I have to wonder, when you’re judging whether to hire a person on the basis of . . . a detail like that, are you really picking the best person for the job?"

This, in fact, is the challenging question that surfaces throughout Bait and Switch, whether Ehrenreich is exploring the so-called Christianization of the workplace through evangelical job-search networks or the inordinate reliance of human resource departments on the pseudo-science of personality tests. What does any of this have to do with finding the most skilled person for the job?

In that regard, Ehrenreich says she was most surprised by the sort of mystical mumbo-jumbo that permeates the corporate world. "Because I am a journalist and was educated as a scientist," she says, "I operate in the fact-based world. I expected that the world of the corporation would be like that. To make money you’ve got to look at facts, at the bottom line. You can’t be deluding yourself. So it’s appalling to find what I can only call the delusional idea that your thoughts can go out there and alter the world. I just read a dozen business bestsellers and I found it over and over this idea that if you just think about money and success they will come to you."

The same sort of thinking pervades the transition industry. "All my coaches emphasized the importance of being positive and upbeat at all times," Ehrenreich says. "All right, you don’t want to be surly when you go into an interview. But the advice extends to mean that you cannot have any negative thoughts . . . because negative thoughts will poison you and will be visible to whoever encounters you."

The result, Ehrenreich says, is a group of cowed, isolated middle-class workers who are unable to get together and make changes that would enhance their work lives and cushion the blow when they are unemployed. With the publication of Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich says, "I hope to stir something up."

The bio on the cover of this frequently provocative, usually informative, and always entertaining saunter through the history, culture, and strange obsessions that have evolved right along with our species’ most elemental form of locomotion, announces that Geoff Nicholson divides his time between London and Los Angeles. To an apprehensive Northern California interviewer, the description suggests not a bi-continental but a bipolar life. London after all seems to be a sensible city of walkers and public-transit-takers; Los Angeles is, well, a city overwhelmed by cars and people driven to road rage.

Not to worry, Nicholson assures during a call to his home in what he calls “the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills.” First of all, since his American wife took a job as an editor in L.A. for Taschen Books, he is now basically an undivided self in Los Angeles. “When we met she was in New York,” the England-born Nicholson, who is the author of some 20 previous works of fiction and non-fiction, says. “I could just about manage the commute between London and New York. But I couldn’t manage the commute between L.A. and London. I’m pretty much here full time now.”

Second, according to Nicholson, there actually are people who walk in Los Angeles. Maybe even a lot of people. These include the actress Christina Ricci, with whom Nicholson took an unintended, socially-awkward, parallel stroll, humorously recounted in the early pages of  The Lost Art of Walking. “Walkers in Los Angeles are the politest people in the world,” Nicholson claims, sounding surprised himself. “They step aside for you. In London, people will push you aside if they’re going somewhere. And in New York the pleasure for walkers comes from your displeasure, from your inconvenience.” Or, as he puckishly writes in the book: “New York is a city where the people not only enjoy getting in your way as you’re walking down the street, they’ll actually go out of their way to obstruct your progress. They’ll inconvenience themselves for the greater pleasure of inconveniencing you.”

Hmm. Nicholson is nothing if not opinionated. But his knowledge of the practice and lore of walking is both deep and wide, and it ambles, struts and occasionally tramps or trudges through nearly every sentence of the book. “At one point I did imagine this as a kind of encyclopedic book containing every possible source and every possible mention of walking in the world,” Nicholson says. “But in the end that would have been a book of almost infinite length.”

The pared down version of The Lost Art of Walking is still suggestively capacious. Nicholson examines, briefly, the evolution and physiology of bipedalism. He writes with flare about representations of walking in sculpture, performance art, popular music, photography, movies and books. He casts an amusingly skeptical eye on both the politics and the spirituality of walking. He tells stories from the history of competitive walking. He strolls easily from, say, a tale of being lost in the desert to an account of the first moonwalk to an argument that Buster Keaton is a far better walker on screen than Charlie Chaplin. Holding it all together are Nicholson’s often-debatable opinions and the fact that he is a delightful storyteller.

Nicholson says that his book on walking was inspired by his move to Los Angeles. “I actually quite like driving and I quite like cars. I don’t necessarily see driving and walking in some terrible opposition. But I do like to be a bit of a contrarian, and the idea of moving to L.A. and lighting out for the territory on foot seemed to be a way of stating my independence. It seemed more interesting, in a perverse kind of way, to explore the city that way.  For me walking has always been that; whenever I get to a place, I set out on foot and try and find highways and byways and alleyways.”

Thus Nicholson writes frequently here of walks and walkers in Los Angeles, Manhattan and London, places where he has spent a lot of time on foot. “I am mildly obsessed about walking and of course the book is about people who are thoroughly, insanely obsessed with walking,” he says. So, emulating or perhaps competing with Iain Sinclair, whose obsessive walking projects in London are well documented, Nicholson sets himself the task of walking back and forth on Oxford Street for a day. “I asked people ‘what’s the place that you most hate to walk in London?’ And Oxford Street came up. I used to have a job near there and my bank was there, so I had actually spent an awful lot of time walking on Oxford Street, but I shared everybody else’s distaste for it. Despite the fact that everybody hated it, everybody was there. There were millions of people in Oxford Street, all of them hating it, partly because everybody else was there. I believed then that I’d found a project that nobody had ever done.”

In Manhattan, partly inspired by novelist Paul Auster’s New York trilogy, Nicholson’s project became The Martini Glass Walk. “I’m a person who does spend a certain amount of time looking at maps,” he says. “I like looking at the shapes and imagining how to walk from there to there. I was looking for the project that had my name on it. I had learned to drink martinis in Manhattan and looking at the Manhattan map, this shape of a martini glass appeared. You’ve got to use a bit of imagination but it is there. Who is the person who said a map is not the territory? If you were a god or a bird you could look down and see me walking out that shape of the martini glass, but on the ground it doesn’t have that feel at all. That was when the scales fell from my eyes about project walks. They somehow spoil the pleasure of walking.”

Nicholson believes that the activity of walking “ties in with the way my brain works. The rhythm of walking and the rhythm of thinking seem to just go perfectly together. People have told me they feel very vulnerable when they’re on foot. But I feel more comfortable, more at home when I’m walking in a strange place than when I’m driving in a strange place. I’m more a city walker than a bucolic walker, I’m very fond of industrial ruin, as you’ll gather from this book. I don’t live in an area of industrial ruin so I’ll drive there and park and wander around. Wander not walk; there’s a kind of aimlessness about it. And I always find I’m more worried about the car – will it be there when I head back, will it start, will the tires be punctured – than about anything I might meet while on foot. I feel I can deal with anything I meet up with on foot. But a couple of slashed tires? Then I have a problem.”

Continuing, Nicholson says, “The last nonfiction book I wrote was called Sex Collectors. It was about people who collect erotica, for lack of a better word. Quite a few of my novels are about people with obsessions, often obsessions with things – cars, guitars, material things. To be alive in the West in the 21st century is to be concerned with materialism. We’re always thinking about why we have what we have and why we have to have more. We all have an intense relationship with the stuff we buy. But walking is one of those activities that really doesn’t have an end product. You can have a swimmer’s body or a body-builder’s body but nobody wants a walker’s body or even knows what that is. Walkers come in all shapes and sizes. You can do things around walking, including writing a book about it, keeping a walking log or taking pictures. But in the end you have to walk – at least I have to walk – just for the sake of walking.”

May The Lost Art of Walking inspire you to rise from the armchair and light out for the territories of your own mild obsessions. On foot.

With The Greatest Generation, veteran NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw shined a spotlight on the courageous and determined men and women who lifted America out of the Great Depression and defeated Hitler in World War II. The 1998 bestseller was embraced as a long-overdue tribute to the sacrifices of ordinary people beset by extraordinary circumstances.

By contrast, Boom! Voices of the Sixties, Brokaw’s omnibus of personal observations interspersed with dozens of contemporary interviews with the baby boom children of the Greatest Generation, is a kaleidoscopic collection of reflection, reassessment and occasional regret for a decade that will forever be defined by the changes it produced.

Like a lightshow worthy of a Grateful Dead concert, Boom! is both dazzling and dizzying as it plays off the sparks, fires and misfires of the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, political dissent, feminism, rock ‘n’ roll, the rise of the counterculture and the race to the moon. Little wonder that no Greatest Generation-style consensus emerges from these pages. One would hardly expect such diverse voices as Andrew Young, Joan Baez, Karl Rove, Gloria Steinem, Bill Clinton, Dick Gregory and astronaut Jim Lovell to agree on much of anything, and they don’t.

"Oh no, there’s no consensus in this one," Brokaw chuckles. "The Greatest Generation was a much more linear generation. The swings in the boomer generation are much greater. The prism through which they see the world is fractured compared to the Greatest Generation."

Brokaw divides Boom! into two parts. The first surveys the turbulent years between the JFK assassination and Richard Nixon’s resignation; the second traces the " aftershocks: consequences, intended or otherwise" that followed.

"My intention was not to write the defining history of the ’60s because a) I don’t think you can do that yet, and b) the books that have been written about the ’60s were primarily books about what was going on only at that time; they don’t have any carryover. My intention was to go back and say, what do we think now?"

The title evokes both the generation that brought about sweeping cultural changes and the suddenness with which those changes occurred. "Crew-cut veterans of World War II looked up at the dinner table—and—boom! they saw a daughter wearing no bra, talking about moving in with her boyfriend, and a son with hair down to his shoulders," Brokaw writes.

Born in 1940, six years before the official start of the baby boom, Brokaw straddles the two generations, but admits the heartland values he grew up with in South Dakota owed more to the Greatest Generation. By the time the Summer of Love arrived in 1967, he was a reporter and anchor with the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles, a husband and father entrenched in the American dream, and, like most Americans, struggling to understand the revolution around him.

"The swings were wild. Anybody who was living during that time was either absolutely repelled by what was going on, utterly charmed by it, or confused and somewhere in the middle. I was in the middle," he says. "They were saying America sucks, but I was thinking well, it doesn’t suck for me."

Brokaw dabbled in the zeitgeist, smoked a little pot, grew his hair to a fashionable length, even donned a peasant shirt on weekends, but it was never a good fit. He aspired to join the ranks of Walter Cronkite and Huntley&Brinkley, and knew that evenhanded reportage on the swiftly changing home front was his ticket to the big chair.

"The major networks and the big newspapers in the country were run by white, middle-aged men who were mostly members of the Greatest Generation," he says. "So it was this startling upheaval in life as we had known it, and the trick was to try to get it right—not to just mock it, not to let the pendulum swing too far, not to become too infatuated with it, which was easy to do."

Loss hangs heavy over this reunion of ’60s voices; gone too soon were such influential figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and John Belushi. Gone too is Brokaw’s college buddy Gene Kimmel, a Marine captain whose 1968 death in Vietnam fueled Brokaw’s anger at the war. "I honestly believe he would have been governor of the state of South Dakota," he says. God, what a loss. "I feel it to this day."

Two observers launched the earliest attempts to try to make sense of the ’60s. Director Lawrence Kasdan’s film The Big Chill used a reunion of college friends to explore the aftermath of the decade, while Lorne Michaels "rearranged the television landscape" by harnessing counterculture humor to produce a hit TV show at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday nights with "Saturday Night Live!"

"One of the great lessons of the ’60s that people have not focused on enough is that it was very entrepreneurial," Brokaw says. "Loren was a perfect example of that; he was a very young man when he did that and it was his idea, his concept. [Apple’s] Steve Jobs grew out of the ’60s zeitgeist. Len Riggio said Barnes&Noble is a product of the ’60s, and it truly is."

Why didn’t more of the seeds of flower power take root?

"What a lot of the younger activists like Sam Brown and Carl Pope said was that they didn’t have any adult supervision. We were great at organization, we were great at tactics; we had no strategy," says Brokaw. "Gary Hart said we could organize a circus in the middle of the Sahara Desert but we didn’t have an economic policy."

Brokaw says that for all its sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, the ’60s will likely remain a Camelot-like era whose very evanescence belies its true impact. As Arlo Guthrie puts it, "Thank God the ’60s are still controversial. It means nobody’s lost yet."

Jay MacDonald still tunes in, turns left and drops stuff.

Even before it hit the bookstores, SuperFreakonomics was inciting scorn and outrage. That may have had something to do with its flashing-lights subtitle: “Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.” This verbal torrent virtually stampeded reviewers toward the juicy parts. The authors couldn’t have hoped for better publicity than seeing Paul Krugman denounce their climatological inferences the New York Times. Which he did.

Like its predecessor, Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics provides great conversational fodder about the immediate and longterm consequences of human actions, both great and small. The point that aroused Krugman’s ire was the book’s implication that the global-warning camp may be a tad alarmist and not always rigorously guided by science. In the same vein, the Center for Injury Research and Prevention assailed the book for questioning the superiority of child safety seats over regular seat belts in shielding children over two from serious injury. (The authors did, however, agree that safety seats are more effective than belts in preventing minor injuries.)

Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Dubner, an author and former editor at The New York Times Magazine, arrived at their conclusions by sifting through a host of research studies to glean insights about human behavior, its causes and effects. Their aim, they say was to “tell stories . . . that rely on accumulated data rather than on individual anecdotes, glaring anomalies, personal opinions, emotional outbursts, or moral leanings.” For example, they venture into why opening up the workplace to women may have led to a measurable decline in teacher quality and why children in utero during Ramadan seem especially susceptible to developmental defects. Accept them or not, the authors’ judgments are consistently thought provoking. BookPage got the chance to ask Stephen Dubner a few questions about the new book.

Early in the book you say, “We are trying to start a conversation, not have the last word?” What ends would you expect such a conversation to serve?
It would be nice if people could think about and discuss and act on things without operating from their preconceived notions.

Why does this book falls under the rubric of economics rather than, say, behavioral psychology? Is it your thesis that all human activity has an economic dimension?
Sure, if you mean by "economic dimension" that we all respond to incentives. But incentives, as we write all over the place, are hardly limited to financial ones.

What was the division of labor for this book? Who did what?
Levitt does the nouns and adverbs, and I do the verbs and adjectives. We quarrel over the prepositions. Well, really: it's a collaboration whose particulars depend very much on the section in question. Some are hybrids of Levitt's empirical research and my reporting and writing. Often we have long talks about how particular sections will be laid out, what works and what doesn't work. The idea is to blend analysis and non-fiction storytelling in a way that short shrifts neither the analysis nor the reading experience.

Given the many variables between outwardly similar situations, do you think history has any predictive power—as opposed to simply being a catalog of possibilities?
I love that question, though I'm not sure my answer is worthwhile. I guess I'd tend toward the "catalog of possibilities" idea, especially if you're talking about economic history. So much of the conversation after the recent financial and economic meltdown centered on predictions based on what had happened in past recessions and depressions—the vast majority of which of course failed to come true (so far, at least).

Are media as sensationalist as you suggest throughout, or are we just more attuned to sensational stories than we are blandly informative ones?
I think they are one and the same. Reporters are humans too, and stories that attract our attention attracted theirs first.

Did you have a system for ferreting out the studies you cite in the book? If so, how did it work?
A lot of the research we write about is, once again, Levitt's academic research, often done in concert with people whom we write about in the book, like John List, Sudhir Venkatesh, Craig Feied, Ian Horsley and others. But we also both spend a lot of time talking to people and hunting down other interesting research.

Did you amass much useful material that didn’t make it into this book?
Yes, quite a bit, but some chapters got too flabby, some stories just didn't gel, and so on.

Do you anticipate that the two of you will collaborate on other projects?
We've talked over a number of things, including future books, but nothing's decided now.

What’s your appraisal of Malcolm Gladwell’s use of the material you cited in your New York Times Magazine article about the “birth date bulge” and the origins of talent?
Malcolm's a wonderful writer. I think he could successfully rewrite the phone book—which, if you think about it, he kind of did in that great section in The Tipping Point about "connectors."

Have the conclusions the two of you reached in writing the Freakonomics books altered your behavior in any way or changed your views on how life should be lived?
Personally, I'd say that it's made me more optimistic in general. One major theme in SuperFreakonomics is that problems that seem virtually unsolvable inevitably do get solved, often by cheap and simple means, and often by someone or something that we weren't expecting.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Go big or go home. He who dies with the most toys wins. There's no end to the figures of speech we've created to explain—or is it justify?—our growing belief that bigger=best. Sarah Z. Wexler, a resident of one of America's largest cities—New York City—traveled around the country exploring this idea in her new book, Living Large. From test-driving Hummers to getting a plastic surgery consultation to seeking out the world's largest ball of twine, Wexler chronicles her adventures with wit, humor and insight. She answered a few questions for us about the topic and the inspiration behind Living Large.

This is your first book—can you tell us a little about how you chose the subject?
I got the idea because one time I went back to Northern Virginia to visit my parents, and I noticed that more and more, small businesses were being replaced by big-box stores, perfectly nice houses from the 1950s and '60s were being bull-dozed to build identical McMansions, with a super-sized SUV in every driveway. It seemed like the norms were shifting, as they had in fast food, where a large is labeled medium, and XL is labeled large, etc, but with everything. I wanted to understand how all of these super-sized things about American life were connected, and why we were defaulting to XXL as the new norm.

There are moments in the book when you seem to be seduced by the larger lifestyle yourself—the Hummer chapter comes to mind! Did you expect to have that reaction?
Definitely not! My goal was to go into every chapter with an open mind and earnestly try to understand what people were getting out of super-sizing this aspect of their lives. But some chapters, like the Hummer, I had a difficult time putting my preconceptions aside and really struggled with it, since I had a lot of judgments about people who drive Hummers. That's why I was surprised that when I drove one myself, after getting over the initial terror of driving something that felt like a school bus, that I was seduced by the comfort, the feeling of safety and machismo and superiority. I understood the appeal–and I understood why I needed to get out of the car, stat!

Is there a time when bigger IS better?
The biggest ball of twine, or the biggest cow sculpture, those kinds of Big America roadside attractions, are just fun, wacky Americana. And there are times when bigger certainly feels better—like saving time when shopping at a big-box store and buying a T-shirt along with Windex and a gallon of milk, for example. If you'd asked me when I was trying on three-carat engagement rings at Tiffany's, or even trying on triple-D breast implants at a plastic surgeon's office, if bigger is better, I would've had to answer yes. But once I did the research about the impact of these choices, bigger consumption is rarely better—it rarely leads to us being happier, better off or more fulfilled.

Did researching the book change any of your own daily habits?
After spending time at the country's largest landfill, I became completely paranoid about how much trash I create, so I've tried to cut down on buying things with lots of packaging that goes straight to landfills. I got rid of my SUV and take public transportation. I also promised myself that whenever possible, I'd avoid shopping at big-box stores. Though you can save about 15% by shopping at a Wal-Mart, in communities where Wal-Marts have opened, the unemployment rate goes up, and participation in PTA groups and even voter registration goes down. The impact on my community is not worth it to me to save a few bucks on dish soap.

One of the things you investigated here is the backlash to the "more more more" stuff—like freeganism, a lifestyle you conclude is just as unsustainable. Can you tell us more about that?
Freegans were fascinating to me, because they live entirely on what the rest of us throw away. They're the antithesis of "living large." It's not that they're financially forced to do it—they're making a conscious choice and a political statement about waste and American excess, and most of them claim they live very well. But even if you can get over the idea of foraging for your dinner in the trash, freeganism is unsustainable for the majority of Americans, because if we all started living off the excess, there wouldn't be enough waste-makers to provide the excess. It's a fascinating ideology, and I learned a lot by Dumpster diving with freegans, but to suggest my mom or my grandma get her food or clothes that way would be completely unrealistic.

A lot of the people you talked to—from Tiffany's store owners to the manager of the MGM Grand—seemed to think that their luxury businesses were here to stay despite the recession. What do you think is the future of the "living large" movement?
Americans have short-term memories. Many Americans have had to downsize in the recession, especially those who lived large above their means; for example, eight times as many McMansions are in foreclosure as the national housing average. But as long as we continue to see living large as good, a sign of success, influence and prosperity, and downsizing as a punishment, when we have money again, we'll go right back to super-sizing. That's why I'm hoping that the silver lining of the recession is that some of us see that living with less doesn't have to be a negative thing—that a smaller house can feel just as, or even more, homey, or that a hybrid will get you there as well as a mega-SUV. Hopefully, this moment is a chance to hit the pause button on our rampant super-sizing—and that in the long run, we'll be able to find the right size, rather than just defaulting to the biggest because we assume it's best.

author photo by Andrea Volbrecht

Ape, chicken, cow, dog, pig, rat, sheep, snake, beast. Each of these words has a distinct connotation, none of them positive. The fact is, though, that no animal behavior can compete with the aggressive and destructive violence exhibited by humans on a regular basis. Animal advocate Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson has published numerous bestsellers about the rich emotional lives of animals. In his latest thought-provoking book, Beasts, Masson turns his attention to humans, posing the questions: who are the real beasts, why, and what can we do about it? We asked Masson—who lives in New Zealand with his family—a few questions about the book.  

How did the idea for Beasts come about?
It occurred to me that we easily recognize animal superiority when it comes to strength, or even some emotions (grief in elephants, for example), but have not commented very much on an even more important fact: Animals are less aggressive than humans.

What’s one of the most surprising things you discovered—about humans or another species—while researching the book?
While in the 20th century humans killed about 200,000,000 other humans, during that same period, as far as we know, no orca killed a single orca in the wild.

Is there a particular (biological or societal) factor that you feel is the most responsible for our inclination toward aggression or violence?
Yes, education. We learn war; we are not destined to it, no matter what Obama says. War did not begin with the first human, as Obama claimed in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. 

Which derogatory animal insult (ape, chicken, cow, snake) that humans lobby at one another do you feel is the most ironic—why?
“Beast,” simply because it is so common, and so off the mark. Humans are the only real beasts.

What do you think is the most common misconception about animal (non-human) aggression?
Nature as red in tooth and claw. It is not. Ninety percent of all mammals are vegetarians.

The book focuses on the worst of human behaviors: war, hatred, killing, exploitation. Is there a bright side?
Yes, indeed there is: We are the only species that creates hospitals for sick members of another species. We have schools of veterinary medicine, that, in theory (alas, rarely in practice) are there not to exploit other animals, but only to help them.

What do you want people to take away from reading the book?
We need to seriously rethink our attitude toward nonhuman animals. Should we eat them (no); should we exploit them in zoos or circuses (no); should we use them for fur or milk or eggs (no)? If we keep them in our homes (cats and dogs,) we should recognize the great honor they accord us.

(Author photo by Corina Koning)