The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Taleb, 2007

Meandering discussion around this central premise: Many things in life follow power-laws, not normal distributions. Wealth, deaths in war, sales of a book, etc. To act as if everything has a standard deviation from an obvious mean is setting yourself up for failure, but that is what most of modern statistics is built upon. “Black swans” (unknown unknowns that could not be predicted via bell curve assumptions) will occasionally come by that disrupt everything.

Abrasive, aggressive writing. We listened to the book on tape while traveling.