I tried to read "Black Swan", I really did.
Spouse had it for a couple weeks and finally said "I give up, I'm tired of the math." (She's taken more math courses than I have.) She appreciates his turkey analogy, and "Gobble, gobble" has entered our household verbal shorthand.
By the time I got my hands on it the library wouldn't renew it, so I waited a couple more months for another copy. By then the suspense was killing me.
When I finally cracked it open, ready to be amazed, I could barely get through the introduction. The guy is so snarky, so grumpy, so curmudgeonly, and so needlessly hostile about everything that it's impossible to get past the tone to his thesis. If Bernstein had written the book from Taleb's notes, it'd be a NYT best-seller. As it is, I feel like locking Taleb in a room with Friedman & Al Gore and letting them solve the world's problems without me. Assuming they survive having to deal with each other...
If Taleb's grumpy now, wait until he realizes that he's been advocating Treasuries during one of the biggest Treasury bubbles of the last 50 years. I hope those options pay off for him.