[close] Taleb was a pioneering trader of complex financial derivatives, and his first major book was a treatise for practitioners. He has since delved into some of the themes that he encountered in that "laboratory" to consider randomness, especially the the epistemology of chance events, more broadly, and his more recent books have sought to make connections between the financial and more general manifestations of these phenomena. He crosses genres by mixing fiction, memoir, and philosophical parables with traditional non-fiction style and references to both humanistic and scientific traditions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... for more. [close]