Rating: 2/5 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007). This book was a disappointment. It started off OK, but it became apparent quite quickly that Taleb is—how should I say this?—arrogant and a bit of a jerk. The main thrust of the book (in itself interesting) could have easily been conveyed...

Rating: 4/5 Keith Devlin, The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern; A Tale of How Mathematics is Really Done (New York: Basic Books, 2008). One of the intriguing things about studying history is hindsight. As a music historian, I was fascinated by the...