Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2012: Fragile things break under stress. But, according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, there's an entire class of other things that don't simply resist stress but actually grow, strengthen, or otherwise gain from unforeseen and otherwise unwelcome stimuli. Taleb sees degrees of antifragility everywhere, from fasting, mythology, and urban planning to economic, technological, cultural, and biological systems. The wealth of radical thinking in this book astounds; the glossary alone offered more thought-provoking ideas than any other nonfiction book I read this year. That said, Antifragile is far from flawless. As comical as Taleb's rough handling of his favorite targets can be--academics, economists, and tourists, to name a few--his argumentative style boasts gaping holes, non sequiturs aplenty, and at times an almost willfully repugnant tone. Some readers will find Taleb's brashness off-putting; others will embrace it as a charismatic component of the ideas themselves. Either way, no one will finish this book unchanged. --Jason Kirk

• The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto)
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto)
• Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
• Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
• The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto)
• Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
• Letters from a Stoic (Penguin Classics)
• The Alchemy of Finance