St Giles Church, Cripplegate was the only thing standing on the site of what is now the Barbican in 1945. It’s still there, surrounded by modern brutalist (in the nicest possible way) architecture. And every now and then it sells second hand books ridiculously cheaply. Last week i picked up Black Swan by Nassem Nicholas Taleb, it was a review hardback, still containing a press release within its pages. i think i remember Terry saying he liked it, but maybe not for the writing. Well, I liked it immediately, particularly for the writing, somehow less pretentious than the Gladwellisms these kind of books normally display. It’s refreshing rant on the tyranny of the bell-curve, the impossibility of prediction and a jaunt through his own history. In a previous book, published before 9/11 he’d mentioned a plane crashing into an office tower. After 9/11 he was inundated with requests asking him to explain how. In this book, in a footnote to a passage headed “naive globalization” he says
the government sponsored institution Fanny Mae, when I look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely”.
