Fooled by Randomness
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | 
The Victorian Internet
by Tom Standage | 
The Quants
by Scott Patterson | 
Lords of Finance
by Liaquat Ahamed | 
Devil Take the Hindmost
by Edward Chancellor | 
Empires of Light
by Jill Jonnes | 
The One Device
by Brian Merchant | 
Wedding of the Waters
by Peter L. Bernstein | 
1491
by Charles C. Mann | 
The Great Influenza
by John M. Barry | 
1493
by Charles C. Mann | 
Connections
by James Burke | 
Polio
by David M. Oshinsky | 
The Codebreakers
by David Kahn | 
A Crack in the Edge of the World
by Simon Winchester | 
The Big Oyster
by Mark Kurlansky | 
The American Plague
by Molly Caldwell Crosby | 
The Most Powerful Idea in the World
by William Rosen | 
Beyond Uncertainty
by David C. Cassidy | 
Project Orion
by George Dyson |
With the stock market breaking records almost daily, leaving longtime market analysts shaking their heads and revising their forecasts, a study of the concept of risk seems quite timely. Peter Bernstein has written a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, beginning with early gamblers in ancient Greece, continuing through the 17th-century French mathematicians Pascal and Fermat and up to modern chaos theory. Along the way he demonstrates that understanding risk underlies everything from game theory to bridge-building to winemaking.