The Black Swan

I recently finished reading The Black Swan, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. The man is a force of nature. Reading Swan feels like reading a little of Godel, Escher, Bach, a little of Black Holes and Baby Universes, and a dose of Gladwellian flavor, but with a distinct scientific rigour aftertaste, which is very kind on the mental palate. Of course, Taleb's work revolves around economics and financial markets, but like a satellite orbiting its planet, its readings and conclusions are distinctly un-finance-like, and have the benefit of excellent, readable, and entertaining prose; narrative, both as personal or historical anecdote and as fiction; and compelling insights to the nature of the black swan.

There is little negative I can say about this book. It's the best work of nonfiction I've read in months, perhaps years. Taleb is a master wordsmith and is erudite without being pedantic. In fact, his humour often stems from making fun of pedants, most of whom end up being French. The amazing amount of reading and knowledge that needs to be packed into a brain such as Taleb's to write this book is humbling, and it is also what makes this book so engrossingly interesting, because the author weaves together stories and scientific hypothesis like a composer matching oboes to organs. What could have been a dry academic paper or a boring technical primer (think Roubini's Crisis Economics) comes alive instead as a true work of literary--nonfiction--art.

As to the book's main topic, the black swan--and its black sheep cousin, the grey swan--is a very interesting topic in its own right. It's certainly worthy of deeper study, at the very least the college level, as it is a subject woefully absent from the contemporary economic and finance conversation. Ironically, the book even briefly touches on the then as-yet-not-occurred economic crisis, in a footnote, where Taleb quickly notes how extraordinarily risky the obligations of certain American quasi-public mortgage-securitising companies are; a note that may have perhaps earned a smart and opened-eyed reader of the hot-off-the-press edition some shorting money. Of course, reading this book in 2011 it is easy to be cynical about the black swan (as in, "duh!"), but in 2007, when the book came out, Taleb mainly had to reference the S&L crisis, the crash of 1987, and the collapse of LTCM in 1998, crises so contained that few readers my age would even know or remember them, unless they had, as I did, studied them in classroom settings. So it is easy to see how, had the book come out at a different time--even five years prior--it may have been roundly dismissed and forgotten. This, another "Godel-Escher-Bach" recursive irony; The Black Swan itself is a black swan. Thankfully, though, the book came out when it did, and has brought at least some attention to the black swan phenomenon, which, sadly, the financial industries have gone right back to ignoring.

In closing, I would recommend this book to anyone who has a yearning for great prose, great philosophising, great storytelling, or great fun. Of course, some literary or scientific maturity is called for; this is not Twilight. Set your standards high. You will not be disappointed.