The Bed of Procrustes

Why are we so often unwilling to accept that life is unpredictable? In this brilliant book Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the bestselling phenomenon Black Swan, distils his idiosyncratic wisdom to show us how we humans, facing the limits of our knowledge, try to squeeze life into reductive categories and pre-packaged narratives.

Here he demolishes our illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance and erudition against modern philistinism and phoniness. Only by accepting what we don't know, he shows, can we see the world as it really is.