Rating: 
Summary: One of the best books on finance ever
Review: This is a fascinating book, both on finance and many other complex phenomena. I have now read it three times.It appears he has made a genuine advance in understanding financial bubbles and crashes. However reading the book does require that you are prepared to think. If you are after someone telling you what to buy or sell, this is not the book for you. Yes there is some math but you really can skip it without losing too much. The quotes that people have included in their reviews are minor asides that merely point the interested to further related material. Some others have commented that his predictions have not all worked out. This is all discussed at length in the book; in such a field predictions are not infallible. About 40% of market crashes are caused by external events and so are not predictable. However he seems to have the S&P500 worked out. Last years he predicted a choppy rally in 1Q2003, then from 2Q2003 a major fall ending in 1h2004. So far so good.
Rating:
Summary: More than it first appears.
Review: This is poorly edited, poorly focussed, and inadequately titled. It discusses the behavior of complex systems containing intelligent operators between cusps. Things like the human biosphere -- as well as financial markets. I would hope for a second edition suitable as a required text for upper-division students of demographics, international relations, ecology, anthropology and the like as well as the economics and finance majors its title seems pointed to.
Read Chapter 10 first. It is the most important. Then you can read the rest.
Rating:
Summary: The makings of a "classic"
Review: This must be one of the most beautiful books I have read in recent history.
The beauty comes from the fact that Didier Sornette has the keys to a room that has been difficult to peer into with our scientific analytic tools. It is the room where opposing forces go at each other: attraction and indifference, greed and fear, solipsism and mass behavior, and maybe even good and evil.He explains why and how the keys to this room work: You get to understand the progress made in important areas of physics, geology and biology over recent years as a foil for how irrational exuberance and crashes occur in finanial markets.
If you want to understand the world, if you are interested in where science has made the most illuminating recent strides in our understanding this book needs to be in your hands.
This is a brilliant work! And fun to read at the same time - especially if you got a little math in your background.
If he keeps doing what he is doing, Sornette is either going to get a Nobel Prize or going to get very rich or both.
( Or after doing some of that he may end up teching classes on Buddhism like Barra Founder Barr Rosenberg )
Rating: 
Summary: Bring your college economics professor along.
Review: WOW! What I thought would be an indepth examination of markets and how and why they fluctuate was...but that's the simplistic version of it. This is, by far, the most complex and detailed account of stock market behavior I think in existence. Whether that's good or bad is entirely up to the individual reader to decide. It is heavy on the mathmatical end of it, so bringing along your left brain with this book is a must. I found it too confusing in trying to make the formulas fit with what the text was trying to tell me. In short, I got so lost I had to reread several points, which detracted from the overall experience of learning. It's excrutiatingly detailed, to say the least. This isn't a bad thing, but definitely not my preference. If you are highly skilled with formulas or have a LOT of time to kill reading a book, I recommend this. Otherwise...just drop your econ professor an email.
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