Fascinating 2010-07-10

Reviewer: Thomas Grover

This is a book that can challenge the way you view the world, your own life, and more than a few of life's basic and irrefutable "laws". If you have an open mind, and are naturally cynical and skeptical you will love this book. Taleb ruthlessly exposes the clay feet of Academics, Economists, Stock Market Prognosticators, and the Nobel Prize. If you happen to be a proponent of any of the above, you will hate this book.

A difficult read, but worth it 2010-07-07

Reviewer: foiegras

Skimming through the most recent 3 pages of reviews on this book, it is pretty obvious that there is a love-hate relationship that readers have with this book.

Trying not to be too elitist, I think you need a certain level of intelligence and education to even understand the depths of what the writer is getting at.

Is the book 30 or 40% too long? Absolutely. Could it have benefited from a good editor? Without question. Can an intelligent reader who is willing to look beyond all of that gain some life-altering knowledge from slogging through it?

Undoubtedly.

There might be a good essay in this turd, somewhere. 2010-07-05

Reviewer: Tyson Tate

I'm tiring of this book quickly. Simple ideas are expanded into entire sections that add no illumination that a simple paragraph could convey. Nassim is obsessed with using large words when a simpler, clearer word would do twice as well. Many sentences should have been cut out. For example:

"I said that I will get into a more thorough examination in Part Three, so let us focus on epistemology for now and see how the distinction affects our knowledge."

What the hell is that? That offers absolutely no new information and doesn't clarify anything.

Nassim also loves using the same, pointless cliché sentence structures over and over. For instance, this cliché is used at least three times in the first 38 pages:

"X implies Y or maybe X doesn't imply Y!"

Wow, Nassim. Golf clap for you. "Maybe Fruit Loops are delicious. Or maybe they aren't! SO AMAZING AND CONFOUNDING."

What a piece of junk. I hate you, Nassim. I paid money for this over-wrought slab of ego tripping.

Funny, sarcastic, irreverent, overwritten, and over-the-top 2010-07-04

Reviewer: Stephen Armstrong

Despite my title for this review, I enjoyed the book. In the land of Katrina, the Dustbowl, LTCM, and BP oil spills, the impact of rare events is extraordinary. But like nearly everything I have read from people educated in business schools, the writing is breathlessly over-the-top, as though he were saying something profoundly and desperately new. The content is not new; what is new is the author's style, which includes a large dose of funny sarcasm and irreverence toward conventional wisdom. A corollary of the author's sarcasm is, however, that you are a pedant, philistine, or ignoramus if you do not believe as he does; that his own intelligence is a highly improbable event; or that disasters won't happen by chance. In this respect, he is an Algernon of earnest economists and intellectuals--witty, intelligent, effete, humorous, and harmless.

Therefore, this book is enjoyable reading, but only if you can feel a healthy skepticism about its profundity.

Tortuous 2010-07-02

Reviewer: Simbo

I made a genuine effort to get all the way through this book, but life is too short to waste on such vacuity. It's strange that the author, being so intelligent and well-read (as he never tires of telling us) didn't realize that the sum of his work has been merely to lift some ideas that have been around for millennia, for example, in Buddhist thought, and rebrand them with management buzz words. Or maybe he did.

Worse, his exploration of these ideas, which he claims as his own, fails to rise above the level of platitude. Endlessly repeated platitude.

Verbose and unbearably pompous, Taleb takes close to 500 pages to say `man doesn't understand the universe' (with the exception of himself, naturally).

The book has merit as an autobiography - a portrait of the type of hubris that rules world financial markets. In this respect, a different title would be more appropriate: `Look How Clever I Am.'