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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Hardcover)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Author) "This is not an autobiography, so I will skip the scenes of war ..." (more)
3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (132 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Allen Lane (3 May 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0713999950
  • ISBN-13: 978-0713999952
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.8 x 3.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (132 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 98,310 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

International Herald Tribune

'Taleb's book deserves our attention, and our thanks'

Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph

'An idiosyncratically brilliant new book'
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Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
This is not an autobiography, so I will skip the scenes of war. Read the first page
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

132 Reviews
5 star:
 (43)
4 star:
 (21)
3 star:
 (27)
2 star:
 (17)
1 star:
 (24)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (132 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars In a nutshell: insightful but rambling, 19 Jun 2009
By Adam Schaffer "adamschaffer" (London) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Paperback)
There are many reviews here already, so I'll keep this short:

- Content: makes insightful points on limitations of our knowledge, human temptation to identify false trends and narratives, follow herd mentality, blindly follow 'experts', and so forth. He calls this 'skeptical empiricism'.

- Style: long-winded and rambling, skipping from personal stories from Lebanon, to parables intended to represent the author, to dull discussions on history of mathematics. I didn't mind it, but some readers hate it.

- Author: massively arrogant and up himself. Thinks he's had the best idea since sliced bread. He's got a good idea, but he's not the first or the only one, just the one with the biggest mouth.

- Other reads: there are better books out there on similar subjects. John Kay (of the FT) writes essays from a similar position, much more concisely and more to the point.

Hope that helps!
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344 of 380 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars right, interesting, but extremely irritating, 28 Nov 2007
By Dean Swift (Hertfordshire) - See all my reviews
Taleb has one good idea, a great idea even, and an infinite number of ways of talking about it. It is essentially the same idea as his last book, Fooled by Randomness: namely that life does not behave with regularity. Those who think it does, he says, will always be tripped up by the unexpected. Black Swan extends that idea, beyond the financial markets he concentrated on in Randomness, to just about all walks of life. He is a magpie for anecdote and stray pieces of supporting evidence wherever he can find them. He calls all this 'skeptical empiricism'.
The qualification is that his big idea is not original, though his numerous examples do help bring home its ubiquity. More problematically, he overstates its usefulness. For when it comes to calling your next move, the unpredictable and the unexpected are, by definition, not things we can anticipate. And though he is right that in the long run there will undoubtedly by high impact improbably events, it is also true, as Keynes said, that in the long run we are all dead: organising your life on the principle that something radical might come along doesn't solve the everyday problem of what to next.
In short, he exaggerates his own insight and the authority it gives him. That's a wicked irony, for the chief target of his ire is those with an exaggerated sense of insight and control over their lives.
Oh, and the tone... Taleb wants to be seen as a radical iconoclast. Every sentence drips righteousness and often irritation. He is the strutting, impatient sage, the rest of us blinkered morons. Apparently he doesn't like his editors trying to change this. A word of advice to the author: if you want your advice heeded, don't shout and sneer at your audience. For this reason, an interesting thesis, but in the end a wearisome read.
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97 of 109 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars enjoyable but sometimes irritating , 31 July 2008
By Janie "Jane O'Neill" (Brighton, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Paperback)
This book is for most part engagingly written and full of entertaining stories and provocative ideas. It makes you reconsider things you take for granted in life and reevaluate your own perspective of the future. But at times I couldn't help feeling that the author was just too full of himself, too pleased with his own ideas and too disparaging towards other people's. Not only does this create a negative feeling but it also works against the book's objectivity. How can a theory be impartial and objective when its author is so in love with himself and his own ideas? Nevertheless this book is a very rewarding read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual earthquake
+
This is an important book. All intellectual people should read it. It should be a set text - certainly for all business school students. Read more
Published 10 days ago by J. Vernon

3.0 out of 5 stars A rambling semi-autobiographical account of a telling insight
A most engaging collection of anecdotes serving to illustrate Taleb's central Black Swan contention - it's the unknowable (minute probability) big impact events that we must bear... Read more
Published 24 days ago by M. Muddasar

1.0 out of 5 stars Fooled into buying into ramble
I found this book even more irritating than the narcissistic outpourings of Fooled By Randomness, the insufferable Taleb's previous ramble on chance and probability. Read more
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I could not agree more with the fine points made by my fellow one star reviewers: The Black Swan is dreadful. Read more
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