Peter Bernstein's "Remarkable Story of Risk" had been on the shelf for so long that it somehow migrated into bedtime reading. While it was engaging and well written, I found I wasn't really the target audience for the book. I was already familiar with all of the mathematics, and even many of the historical anecdotes, that he discusses in the first half of the book. And just a routine tour of duty in finance makes the second half's discussion of risk management techniques a bit redundant. In fact, I almost stopped reading after the eye-rolling-ly triumphant late 90's tone of the introduction; these days, that era's presumption that we had managed to design a foolproof self-correcting risk management system looks nothing short of amazingly naive. However, I'm glad I pushed on despite my misgivings. I ended up enjoying the way Bernstein unfolded his story and nuanced the neo-liberal tone he began with. Ultimately, it's not a bad book to hand someone who has never reflected on the issue of what "risk" is, nor how our definition of this concept has shifted over time.
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