11 best books of December, according to Amazon's editors

Want to surprise the readers on your holiday gift list? Offer them the very latest of 2012 books – those hot-off-the-press titles that arrived too late for the year-end "best of" lists. These 11 books were chosen by Amazon's editors as the best fiction and nonfiction titles released in the last month of 2012. In an interview with the Monitor, Amazon’s editorial director of books and Kindle Sara Nelson shares her thoughts on these books and tells us why they were chosen for this list.

1. ‘Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From the bestselling author of “Black Swan” comes another iconoclastic title that explores “the antifragile,” things that flourish under chaos and uncertainty. In the same vein as Nate Silver’s “The Signal and The Noise,” this book turns convention on its head to explore a gamut of topics – modern architecture, medicine, formal education – from a revolutionary new perspective. “It’s completely counter-intuitive,” says Nelson. One of Amazon’s editors told Nelson of the title, “You’ll never have more fun that’s more maddening.”

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