Joel E Lewis

The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Random House 2007, Hardcover, 366 pages, $9.95

The first thing I learned reading Black Swan, is that Nassim Taleb is highly intelligent, but at least twice as arrogant as he is intelligent.  In the first few chapters alone, it is clear that his self-love is enough to make Narcissus blush.  What is unclear in [...]

Shogun (The Asian Saga Chronology)
James Clavell. Delta 2009, Paperback, 1008 pages, $8.13

Shogun is a truly epic work of fiction.  Shogun reveals the world of feudal Japan, largely through the eyes of a shipwrecked English navigator striving to break the Spanish/Portuguese/catholic monopoly on Asian trade in the name of England and Protestants everywhere.  I Can’t help but steal a [...]

The Fat Tail
Ian Bremmer. Oxford University Press, USA 2009, Hardcover, 272 pages, $11.95

The Fat Tail’s central argument is that businesses rarely forecast and prepare for political risks as well as they do economic ones, which is a mistake because most political risks can be found in the “Fat Tail” of probability charts, where unlikely but high impact events [...]

A History of God
Karen Armstrong. Ballantine Books 1994, Paperback, 496 pages, $6.65

I never got much out of Sunday School aside from the watered down bible’s stories, usually stripped of all context and religious meaning.  Karen Armstrong’s early experience was similiar:

When I was eight years old, I had to memorize this catchsim answer to the question, “What is God?”: [...]