Černá labuť / Následky vysoce nepravděpodobných událostí – Taleb Nassim Nicholas (2011)

A bestseller by an American academic and investment advisor of Lebanese descent analyzes the phenomenon of 'black swans,' i.e., unforeseen events and occurrences with significant impacts on the lives of individuals or entire societies, such as the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the phenomenal success of Google, or the recent global financial and economic crisis. The author - one of the few experts who predicted the onset of the crisis - believes that the cause of our unpreparedness for such pivotal events is primarily the inertia of our thinking, characterized by excessive trust in statistics and forecasts, over-categorization, searching for 'logic' in developments, or focusing on specifics where we should be thinking in more general contexts. His book, which calls for a reevaluation of our established worldview and an acknowledgment of how little we know about it, is today one of the most discussed works in its genre, labeled by the Times as one of the most influential works of the last sixty years, and due to the author's broad perspective, sense of humor, and healthy provocativeness, it is also a great reading experience.