Nassim Taleb

"[Taleb is] Wall Street's principal dissident.... [Fooled By Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther's ninety-nine theses were to the Catholic Church."--Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker Finally in paperback, the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about the markets and the world. This book is about luck: more precisely how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill--the world of business--Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, iconoclastic, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in all of our lives. - From the Trade Paperback edition.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb examines the outsized role that rare, unpredictable events-which he calls "Black Swans"-play in shaping history, society, and individual lives. He argues that humans are wired to overlook these outliers, instead constructing tidy explanations after the fact while remaining blind to future disruptions.