The only lesson I really learned from my AP Statistics class in high school was this: You can make numbers say anything you want. It’s all about how you look at them.

Steven Levitt has a very unique way of looking at numbers. Lest you’re concerned about reading a book written by an economist, rest assured that his collaborator, journalist Stephen Dubner, makes sure reading Freakonomics isn’t a painful experience.

There are six chapters in their book, and each answers a question using a myriad of true-life examples. What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Cheating, turns out, and American tax payers, Isralei parents with kids in daycare, and corporate patrons of a bagel business aren’t any different.

The book addresses other intriguing questions. How is the KKK like a group of real estate agents; why do drug dealers still live with their moms; what makes a perfect parent, and, perhaps most controversially, where have all the criminals gone? (It’s not a pleasant theory.)

Along the way, Levitt and Dubner weave all kinds of anecdotes into their pages to help you understand, from the rule of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to how a sociologist found similarities between McDonalds and a crack gang.

Some of the conclusions are a bit outlandish if you ask me. Sure, the numbers back him up, but do you really want to throw caution to the wind and parent any way you want to just because parenting isn’t shown to have much of a difference on your children’s test scores? The book is an attempt to make sense of data from the past, not to create solutions for the future. If you keep this in mind, you should be able to get through the book – its most controversial chapter included – with a cool head.