Against the Gods

The Remarkable Story of Risk

Ranked #4 in Insurance, Ranked #5 in Risk Managementsee more rankings.

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. less

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We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Against the Gods from the world's leading experts.

Jason Zweig In the book, he explores risk at every conceivable level – what it is mathematically and what it is psychologically, how it has played out historically, how people have thought to measure it and also to control it. (Source)

John Lanchester it’s an absolutely fascinating, for-the-layman account of how humanity mastered risk and came to understand probability. (Source)


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