Risk, Uncertainty and Everything Else

Lately I have been doing a lot of traveling between State College, PA and Washington, DC for meetings and such.  To pass the 3.5-hours minimum driving time each way, I, like many others listen to audiobooks on subjects that excite me.  The following is a list of titles for good audiobooks I listened to that are sure to educate, if not inspire, risk professionals.  Note that I purchased all these books from Audible.com via ITunes.

• Freakonomics, by Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.  The essence of this book was that everything is governed by incentives.  But, as the author points out in his preface, there really is no coherent theme to the book; it is just a compilation of interesting

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Security Risk Professional’s Bookshelf, Volume 1, Number 1

Citation: Purpura, P. P. (2007). Terrorism and Homeland Security: An Introduction with Applications.  Butterworth-Heinemann (Elsevier).  ISBN: 978-0-7506-7843-8.

Here we have what appears to be an undergraduate text centered on this idea of homeland security.  It seems that the target readership for this book are HLS novices, so from that point of view the text covers a nice swath of homeland security issues and recent milestones (legislation, strategies, etc.).  But I think the book would come off as being quite lame to those in the homeland security community who know a thing or two about what it is, what is should be, and where it is (really) headed.  This book is truly an introductory text aimed at exposing…

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Due to a variety of coincidental circumstances, I happened upon one hundred books covering a variety of topics spanning the fields of risk and decision analysis, uncertainty modeling and intelligence. This is a lot of books. So, I decided to perfect the art of the “10-minute” review by offering the community my thoughts on each title, to include a bit of personal meta-data on the subject, title, author and so on. And in the spirit of speaking to the risk community, I will call this series “The Security Risk Professional’s Bookshelf” (I borrowed the title from the “Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf” published in each issue of the CIA’s journal Studies in Intelligence).

The titles for this first round (as I anticipate many more rounds of 100-books) are as follows in…

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