Michael Lewis

How a Nobel Prize winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality."

A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

The Undoing Project

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about.

A Pandemic Story

The Premonition

"The election happened," remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. "And then there was radio silence." Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them.Michael Lewis's brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it's not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system--those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.

Undoing Democracy

The Fifth Risk

Argues that post-crisis Wall Street continues to be controlled by large banks and explains how a small, diverse group of Wall Street men have banded together to reform the financial markets.

A Wall Street Revolt

Flash Boys

Tells the unlikely story of Silicon Valley and discusses the future of American business and free enterprise through the life of Jim Clark, who founded Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

The #1 New York Times bestseller—Now a Major Motion Picture from Paramount Pictures From the author of The Blind Side and Moneyball, The Big Short tells the story of four outsiders in the world of high-finance who predict the credit and housing bubble collapse before anyone else. The film adaptation by Adam McKay (Anchorman I and II, The Other Guys) features Academy Award® winners Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo and Marisa Tomei; Academy Award® nominees Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling. When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread. Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? In this fitting sequel to Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis answers that question in a narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (movie tie-in)

inside the doomsday machine

The big short

The author of The Big Short describes the effect that the bubble of cheap credit readily available to almost anyone between 2002 and 2008 had on countries beside the U.S., including Iceland, Greece and Germany. 200,000 first printing.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

An unsparing observation about the disparity between social expectation and the actual experiences of new fathers shares stories from the author's life after the births of his three children.

Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood

The author of Liar's Poker and The Next New Thing explains the Internet's role in how people live, work, and think, identifying a status revolution in which individuals are key players, and offers a forecast of future implications of this technological revolution on human society. Reprint. 55,000 first printing.

Next: The Future Just Happened

"This delightfully written, lesson-laden book deserves a place of its own in the Baseball Hall of Fame." —Forbes Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis follows the low-budget Oakland A's, visionary general manager Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball theorists. They are all in search of new baseball knowledge—insights that will give the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money.

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball

'We fed the monster until it blew up ...' While Wall Street was busy creating the biggest credit bubble of all time, a few renegade investors saw it was about to burst, bet against the banking system - and made a fortune. From the jungles of the trading floor to the casinos of Las Vegas, this is the outrageous story of the misfits, mavericks and geniuses who, against all odds, made the greatest financial killing in history.

Inside the Doomsday Machine

The Big Short

'If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn't go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn't ever do it twice.' Michael Lewis thought he'd seen it all. He'd worked in the city. He knew how to deal with the worst excesses of human behaviour. He had cojones. Right? Wrong. He was about to become a father . . . 'I know for a fact that my children are insane. Or, at any rate, I know that if an adult behaved as my children do, he would be institutionalized. Is it possible that they are contagious?' Here Lewis reveals his own unique take on new-found paternity: from discovering your three-year-old loves to swear to the ethics of taking your offspring gambling at the races, from toilet training to the inevitable tantrums - of both parent and child - and the gradual realization that, despite everything, he's becoming hooked (although to something more expensive than a Class A drug habit). 'Small children are ungrateful; to do one a favour is, from a business point of view, about as shrewd as making a subprime mortgage loan.' Home Game is probably the most brazenly honest and wickedly funny book about parenting ever written. 'Much effort, none of it mine, has gone into preparing for this moment . . . '

An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood

Home Game

Drawing on his experience as a trainee at Salomon Brothers in New York, an investment banker and a financial journalist, the author of Liar's Poker and The Big Short examines the turbulent business landscape of the 1980s. Reissue.

The Money Culture

“Brilliant. . . . Lewis has given us a spectacular account of two great men who faced up to uncertainty and the limits of human reason.” —William Easterly, Wall Street Journal Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

'A highly enjoyable exercise in financial disaster tourism... politically incorrect, often very funny, and shot through with genuine insight' Robert Harris, The Times In this hilarious, fascinating, timely must-read, Michael Lewis reveals the true natures of the countries caught up in - and exacerbating - our boomerang economies, showing how the financial meltdown hit us all in the face. Right now, Europe is in serious financial chaos. In Greece, infrastructure costs mean it would be cheaper to transport all Greek rail passengers by taxi, and hairdressing is classified as arduous for tax avoidance purposes. In Iceland, Range Rovers frequently explode as owners collect the insurance to pay for them. Ireland saw the entire country put up for sale - to itself, while the Germans expected the whole world to behave like them. But the whole world didn't. 'Chock-full of extraordinary characters, amusing anecdotes and shocking insights' Observer 'A tour de force... All those questions you've half-asked yourself: nowhere else will you find them answered with such incisive wit or terrifying clarity' Mail on Sunday

The Meltdown Tour

Boomerang

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker. Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is Michael Lewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of an unprecedented era of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune.

Liar's Poker

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work. Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

"Lewis has such a gift for storytelling... he writes as lucidly for sports fans as for those who read him for other reasons."--Janet Maslin, New York Times When we first meet Michael Oher is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or how to read or write. He takes up football, and school, after a rich, white, Evangelical family plucks him from the streets. Then two great forces alter Oher: the family's love and the evolution of professional football itself into a game in which the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist becomes the priceless package of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard the quarterback's greatest vulnerability: his blind side.

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game

An account of the 1996 presidential campaign follows the candidates and examines the realities of American politics

Michael Lewis

About

Books

Join the club