Snap Judgment: The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable (prologue and chapters I - III)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's thesis is interesting enough, if rather dry: that modern statistics has such a focus on the standard bell-curve that outliers are routinely omitted from any given data-set in order to artificially create one. Couple that with his observation that outlying events are not only inevitable, but highly impactful, and you have many critical fields of study that delude themselves on a regular basis. Taleb refers to these outlying events, of course, as Black Swans.

But Taleb's error in these first few chapters is not in his thesis--it's in his delivery. Like an actor overstepping his entertainment boundaries to promote ill-formed political biases, Taleb painfully trips over himself to make snide parenthetical comments regarding irrelevant trivialities. At one point in the first chapter, Taleb uses a paragraph-long footnote to expound his thoughts on why "Levantine" is a more appropriate term than "Lebanese" to describe people from Lebanon (apparently, Lebanon is too new a country to deserve its own -ese just yet). These reckless asides are so frequent and distracting that you have to wonder whether the manuscript ever crossed an editor's desk, or if Random House instead settled for a simple once-over from a team of proofreaders. Perhaps the book itself was a black swan, far more successful than the publisher ever expected based on the minimal editorial attention allotted.

Regardless of what Taleb is focusing on at any given point, the tone of his prose is consistent: presumptuous, professorial, and filled with self-aggrandizement. Take this example from the end of chapter one:  

     Once, on a transatlantic flight, I found myself upgraded to first class next to an expensively dressed, high-powered lady dripping with gold and jewelry who continuously ate nuts (low-carb diet, perhaps), [and] insisted on drinking only Evian... She kept trying to start a conversation in broken French, since she saw me reading a book (in French) by the sociologist-philosopher Pierre Bourdieu--which, ironically, dealt with the marks of social distinction.

These anecdotes are sprinkled throughout to serve as evidence that Taleb is intelligent and worth our time--if we're worth his. His style is pompous and forced, with occasional jocularity that comes off as contempt; in short, he isn't someone I want to spend 305 pages with, despite my interest in his thesis. And that's the most frustrating part: this book probably does contain worthwhile, exciting information. But you'd have to get past Taleb to find it.

For those interested in the subject matter who also want to enjoy the reading experience, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and The Tipping Point are excellent, as is Leonard Mlodinow's revelatory (and happily math-heavy) The Drunkard's Walk. These books all tackle similar concepts to Taleb's but with more veracity and excitement, and none of the self-congratulatory pretense of The Black Swan.

Verdict: [D+]