The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

"The hubris of predictions—and our perpetual surprise when the not-predicted happens—are themes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's engaging new book, The Black Swan. It concerns the occurrence of the improbable, the power of rare events and the author's lament that 'in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it. We expect all swans to be white and are shocked when a black swan swims by… In The Black Swan, Taleb proclaims that the unexpected is the key to understanding not just financial markets but history itself" (New York Times).