The Black Swan

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Synopsis by Farha Tasneem

Purchase Availability:  Amazon.com,  Rokomari.com, BoiBazar.com, Nilkhet, New Market, Aziz Super market, Bigglobooks,  Bookspider BD, Tome BD, MKBookhousebd
[Customization available at  Pustoq, Booktique, and Pathak Shomabesh]


Price Range:
BDT 200 – BDT 3500

Synopsis: 

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses human psychology and decision making in rare improbable events. He explains how unexpected outlier events dramatically change our lives and when they do so, what we can do to become better at expecting the unexpected. Taleb calls this the “Black Swan Theory”. This book is the second book of the five books in Taleb’s “Incerto” series and has spent 36 weeks on New York’s bestseller list.

The Black Swan is a positive or a negative outlier event that has extreme impact and is explainable in retrospect. Because of its high impact on our lives, they cannot be avoided; rather we need to increase exposure to positive black swans and limit them to the negative ones. Therefore, building robustness to these events, which is the central idea of the book. 

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The Black Swan helps us to change how we perceive the world and make decisions in life with its refined, remarkable, and universal application. With Taleb’s entertaining writing, wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell, this is a worth-reading book.

The book moves from literary subjects in the beginning to scientific and mathematical parts in the later portions. The main idea of this book can be understood without prior knowledge of psychology, mathematics, or statistics. However, those might be helpful in better understanding the scientific bits addressed in the later chapters.