Ranked #4 in Insurance, Ranked #5 in Risk Management — see 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
Reviews and Recommendations
We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Against the Gods from the world's leading experts.
![](https://media.shortform.com/avatars/howard-marks-5226.jpg)
Howard Marks So good. (Source)
![](https://media.shortform.com/avatars/jason-zweig-8149.jpg)
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)
![](https://media.shortform.com/avatars/john-lanchester-26299.jpg)
John Lanchester it’s an absolutely fascinating, for-the-layman account of how humanity mastered risk and came to understand probability. (Source)
Rankings by Category
Against the Gods is ranked in the following categories:
- #40 in Accounting
- #34 in Analysis
- #92 in Business Economics
- #81 in Decision Making
- #36 in Economic History
- #48 in Finance
- #43 in Financial Management
- #41 in Gambling
- #47 in Investment
- #9 in Probability
- #29 in Statistics
- #57 in Stocks