The Black Swan explains why we are so bad at predicting the future, how unlikely events can dramatically change our lives, and what we can do to become better at expecting the unexpected.

Up until 1697, Europeans believed all swans were white, and the term 'black swan' was used as a metaphor for something impossible.

But when Dutch explorers finally saw black swans for the first time in Western Australia, it turned out that what we consider impossible might say more about us than it does about the world.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a statistician and former options trader whose writing on risk, psychology, and society has made him a celebrity.

A New York Times bestseller, The Black Swan is the second book of Incerto, Taleb's five-volume series on uncertainty.

Through a lively mix of statistics and personal anecdotes, Taleb explores risk, probability, and how bad we are at using them to estimate the likelihood of real-life events.