Flight of the Black Swan - Stephanie Baker-Said

Taleb has gone from being a leading Wall Street heretic--he rails against economists and quantitative model makers--to a mini institution whose appeal reaches well beyond the realm of finance. More than 370,000 copies of The Black Swan are in print in the U.S. and the U.K. It spent 17 weeks on the New York Times best- seller list and is being translated into 27 languages. It even outranks Alan Greenspan's memoirs, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Penguin, 2007), among 2007 best-sellers on Amazon.com. The success of The Black Swan has led to a $4 million advance for the English-language rights to a follow-up book, according to a person familiar with the deal. It's tentatively titled Tinkering and will examine how to live in a world we don't understand. Taleb now charges more than $60,000 for some of his lectures, according to the London Speaker Bureau, a firm that places business, political and motivational speakers. He warns audiences against believing worst-case scenarios and making so-called naked, or unhedged, bets on the future that could lead to disastrous losses. Flight of the Black Swan By Stephanie Baker-Said