There is a strong case for the view that everything of interest about the Nobel Laureates in Economics of the last two decades has already been proclaimed in the official biographies that accompany their awards. Perhaps for this reason, Perry Mehrling chose as the subject of his most recent book not Robert Merton or Myron Scholes, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1997, but their co-author Fischer Black, who died in 1995 and therefore could not share in their award because the Prize is never awarded posthumously. Had he been alive and shared in the Prize, there is no doubt that a Nobel biography highlighting the ‘scientific discovery’ of the Black-Scholes option pricing formula would have captured all that was exciting about Fischer Black. Perry Mehrling's book demonstrates how much more can be said about someone whose life and career was as predictable as his acclaimed contribution to economics was uncontroversial.

Mehrling's attempt to invest Black with heroic qualities is perhaps the only major failure of this book. The son of a small-town businessman, Fischer Black's precocious ability in mathematics and computing brought him a scholarship to study physics and mathematics at Harvard. There, the famous American liberal university education ensured that he acquired no systematic knowledge of any subject in particular, but was able to dabble in social science and philosophy (he returned to the work of Willard Quine later in life).