The veteran options trader (and indefatigable sceptic intellectual) Nassim Taleb has ended 2007 as the top bestselling author in the nonfiction book category, according to Amazon.com. Mr Taleb's The Black Swan crowns his outrageously successful transition from market player to popular muser.

As is well known, the book deals with unexpected, rare events that have a profound effect when they eventually take place. Mr Taleb's main assertion is that we tend to misunderstand such events, and stubbornly assign small (even negligible) probabilities to them. In real life, "black swans" happen much more often than generally assumed. This is particularly true in the world of finance, where events that are assigned probabilities of one in 1m years make a semi-regular appearance every half-decade or so.