Home | Browse Things | Search Things | Browse People

Login/Register | New Review

Review of: The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

1/5 (minimum 1)

by tom on 05 Jan 2009

This was the first Nassim Nicholas Taleb book I've read, and was quite the worst book I've read in some time. I'm sure, at least I'd like to believe, that there are some interesting and valuable ideas here, but after about one third of the book and many doses of frustration and irritation I had to give up. Leafing through the remainder of the text I didn't see anything to suggest things would get better if I carried on.

I'd like to try and summarise the main point of the author's arguments here, but I found the book so disjointed and lacking in narrative clarity that I'm struggling to capture the essence of it. I found the book terrible at signposting where the narrative is leading and as a result I found it very easy to get lost. The section and chapter headings strike me as at best meaningless and at worst self-indulgent, adding little to the reader's comprehension.

Ideas are introduced seemingly at random (and tend to disappear from the story as quickly as they appear), and are rarely well backed up by evidence, argument, or in some cases even explanation. One passage that particularly got me went something like "We call this phenomenon abc...", with no explanation of who "We" consisted of (We, members of a certain school of thought? We, the author and the reader? We, society as a whole?) and therefore no opportunity for the reader to understand the context of this label.

I found the fictional characters introduced in the book, such as Yevgenia Nikolayevna Krasnova, unconvincing and irritating. Don't introduce a fictional character as if they're real, and then say afterwards "actually, in case you Googled her, I made her up".

In the end I came away feeling I'd gained nothing, except a deeply negative impression of the author. I found the anti-French comments littered throughout the book unpalatable, but most of all the poor read was annoying and left me wondering who had ever agreed to publish this. Whatever you do, take the hype on the jacket with a bucket of salt.

Review Permalink: http://revyu.com/reviews/60df9332fc5ce3825f3317d63df2f9848f770830