I t would be easy to think, from his place in the culture, that ­Nassim Taleb writes those ­Malcolm Gladwell-style big ideas books that have been such a recent vogue: slick expansions of journalism with a self-help edge. But Taleb, the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, is much, much more eccentric and, in a way, more interesting than that.

A mixture of parables, personal anecdote, ad hominem attacks, pseudo-Socratic dialogues involving an imaginary figure called Fat Tony, aphorisms and homespun philosophy ranging across subjects as diverse as finance, medicine, urban planning, political theory and how best to achieve an ­awesomely ripped set of abs, Antifragile reads like the ramblings of a clever, slightly cracked and intensely chippy autodidact — which is, it turns sout, exactly what it is.

via Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | The Sunday Times.
HatTip to Dave Lull