I just finished this book, and having just started reading it today at lunch, it's safe to say that I could not put it down. Long story short, it's a critique of "conventional thinking" on a variety of topics. The critique is from the point-of-view of an economist's analysis of available data.

Topics are as varied as "what are the real causes of the decline of crime in the 90's", to "what impact does the 'obsessive' parent's attention to tiny details of a child's life really have to do with future performance". The answers the authors derive are often surprising and always interesting.

One of the points that the authors put forth is how people are drawn to the "truths" that support their preconceptions and emotions, rather than looking deeper into the actual facts (much less accepting them when presented).

Take gun control, for instance. Liberal parents may not want their child to visit a gun owner's home due to safety issues, but feel perfectly fine letting their child visit a home with a pool. This, despite the fact that children die orders of magnitude more often in pool accidents than in gun accidents. However, no matter how you argue the facts, these parents won't feel right about the gun owner's home. (By the way, I'm pretty socially liberal, and don't own a gun, but I'm also not in favor of gun control).

The evidence given in this book for our preference toward "the truths we like" helps support, in my mind, what I've always felt intuitively: people choose the channels of information that best suit what they want to hear, and call the rest biased.