Best Selling Books by Michael Lewis

The #1 New York Times bestseller: "It is the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game. And it''s essential reading."—Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn''t shine and the SEC doesn''t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can''t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren''t talking. Michael Lewis creates a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 bestseller Liar''s Poker. Out of a handful of unlikely-really unlikely-heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our time.

New York Times Bestseller. “A superb book. . . . [Lewis] makes Silicon Valley as thrilling and intelligible as he made Wall Street in his best-selling Liar’s Poker.”—Time In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis set out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world’s most important technology entrepreneur. He found this in Jim Clark, a man whose achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies. Lewis also found much more, and the result—the best-selling book The New New Thing—is an ingeniously conceived history of the Internet revolution.

New York Times Bestseller 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 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.

“Lewis shows again why he is the leading journalist of his generation.”—Kyle Smith, Forbes The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. Michael Lewis''s investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.

Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ''s 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

The New York Times bestseller. "His book is a wake-up call at a time when many believe the net was a flash in the pan."—BusinessWeek With his knowing eye and wicked pen, Michael Lewis reveals how the Internet boom has encouraged changes in the way we live, work, and think. In the midst of one of the greatest status revolutions in the history of the world, the Internet has become a weapon in the hands of revolutionaries. Old priesthoods are crumbling. In the new order, the amateur is king: fourteen-year-olds manipulate the stock market and nineteen-year-olds take down the music industry. Unseen forces undermine all forms of collectivism, from the family to the mass market: one black box has the power to end television as we know it, and another one may dictate significant changes in our practice of democracy. With a new afterword by the author.

The #1 New York Times Bestseller "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 him, 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 where 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 classic warts-and-all portrait of the 1980s financial scene. The 1980s was the most outrageous and turbulent era in the financial market since the crash of ''29, not only on Wall Street but around the world. Michael Lewis, as a trainee at Salomon Brothers in New York and as an investment banker and later financial journalist, was uniquely positioned to chronicle the ambition and folly that fueled the decade.

New York Times Bestseller What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works? "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.

“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.

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER With a new afterword on Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial and its aftermath One of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023 • One of PureWow’s 42 Books to Gift in 2023 This Year • One of Fortune’s Best Crypto Books of 2023 “Going Infinite is in many ways Lewis at his best. He marshals a complex global story without losing sight of the delightful and revealing human details. He is a world-class noticer.” —Jesse Armstrong, writer and creator of HBO’s Succession, Times Literary Supplement “A stupefyingly pleasurable book to read.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker “Going Infinite is an instant classic.” —Helen Lewis, The Atlantic “Going Infinite is wildly entertaining, surprising multiple times on pretty much every page, but it adds up to a sad story, even a tragedy, for its central character and for all the people who lost so much thanks to his actions.” —John Lanchester, London Review of Books “Will join Digital Gold as one of the all-time best crypto books.”—Jeff John Roberts, Fortune “A wry, engaging writer and a gifted storyteller.” —Julia M. Klein, Los Angeles Times “It may be easy to take for granted how entertainingly [Michael Lewis] pulls it off again in Going Infinite.” —Brett Martin, GQ From the best-selling author of The Big Short and Flash Boys, the story of FTX’s spectacular collapse and the enigmatic founder at its center. When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side? In Going Infinite Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, Going Infinite is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own—until it all came undone.

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 story with a big heart about a boy, a coach, the game of baseball, and the game of life. "There are teachers with a rare ability to enter a child''s mind; it''s as if their ability to get there at all gives them the right to stay forever." There was a turning point in Michael Lewis''s life, in a baseball game when he was fourteen years old. The irascible and often terrifying Coach Fitz put the ball in his hand with the game on the line and managed to convey such confident trust in Lewis''s ability that the boy had no choice but to live up to it. "I didn''t have words for it then, but I do now: I am about to show the world, and myself, what I can do." The coach''s message was not simply about winning but about self-respect, sacrifice, courage, and endurance. In some ways, and now thirty years later, Lewis still finds himself trying to measure up to what Coach Fitz expected of him.

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker. Before there was Flash Boys and The Big Short, there was Liar''s Poker. A knowing and unnervingly talented debut, this insider’s account of 1980s Wall Street excess transformed Michael Lewis from a disillusioned bond salesman to the best-selling literary icon he is today. Together, the three books cover thirty years of endemic global corruption—perhaps the defining problem of our age—which has never been so hilariously skewered as in Liar''s Poker, now in a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition with a new afterword by the author. It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never before had so many twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time. After you learned the trick of it, all you had to do was pick up the phone and the money poured in your lap. This wickedly funny book endures as the best record we have of those heady, frenzied years. In it Lewis describes his own rake’s progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick, the most dangerous beast in the jungle, a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars'' worth of doubtful bonds with just one call. As he has continued to do for a quarter century, Michael Lewis here shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. In the Salomon training program a roomful of aspirants is stunned speechless by the vitriolic profanity of the Human Piranha; out on the trading floor, bond traders throw telephones at the heads of underlings and Salomon chairmen Gutfreund challenges his chief trader to a hand of liar’s poker for one million dollars.

The New York Times bestseller: “Hilarious. No mushy tribute to the joys of fatherhood, Lewis’ book addresses the good, the bad, and the merely baffling about having kids.”—Boston Globe When Michael Lewis became a father, he decided to keep a written record of what actually happened immediately after the birth of each of his three children. This book is that record. But it is also something else: maybe the funniest, most unsparing account of ordinary daily household life ever recorded, from the point of view of the man inside. The remarkable thing about this story isn’t that Lewis is so unusual. It’s that he is so typical. The only wonder is that his wife has allowed him to publish it.

Michael Lewis is a master at dissecting the absurd: after skewering Wall Street in his national bestseller Liar''s Poker, he packed his mighty pen and set out on the 1996 campaign trail. As he follows the men who aspire to the Oval Office, Lewis discovers an absurd mix of bravery and backpedaling, heroic possibility and mealy-mouthed sound bytes, and a process so ridiculous and unsavory that it leaves him wondering if everyone involved—from the journalists to the candidates to the people who voted—isn''t ultimately a loser. The contenders: Pat Buchanan: becomes the first politician ever to choose a black hat over a white one. Phil Gramm: spends twenty million dollars to convince voters of his fiscal responsibility. John McCain: makes the fatal mistake of actually speaking his mind. Alan Keyes: checks out of a New Hampshire hotel and tells the manager another candidate will be paying his bill. Steve Forbes: refuses to answer questions about his father''s motorcycles. Bob Dole: marches through the campaign without ever seeming to care. Losers is a wickedly funny, unflinching look at how America really goes about choosing a President.

''Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . . '' From Black Monday to the Asian financial crisis, from the internet bubble to mortgage meltdown, our lives are rules by crazy cycles of euphoria and hysteria that manage to grip the world but are all-too-soon forgotten. In this unique collection of articles, Michael Lewis - ex-trader and bestselling chronicler of avarice and frenzy in the markets - casts a sceptical eye back over the most panicked-about panics of recent decades. He tells a story of boom and busts, deranged greed, outsized egos and over-inflated salaries, where the only thing that can ever be predicted is out constant inability to predict anything. Using contemporary account form commentators such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman, plus many of his own best writings, Lewis conveys the mood before each catastrophe, what it was like in the heat of the moment, how, afterwards, we tires to explain away the chaos - and then failed to learn from it before the whole process started all over again. Panic! Gives us a completely new insight into how markets really operate - and who really knows what they''re talking about.

" A] valuable addition s] to the stock of material available for fledgling social scientists. Lewis-Bec''s book is best for early nurture. . . " --Eric Tanenbaum in ESRC Data Archive Bulletin "This book, I predict, will turn the statistics-s

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.

Shame, the quintessential human emotion, received little attention during the years in which the central forces believed to be motivating us were identified as primitive instincts like sex and aggression. Now, redressing the balance, there is an explosion of interest in the self-conscious emotion. Much of our psychic lives involve the negotiation of shame, asserts Michael Lewis, internationally known developmental and clinical psychologist. Shame is normal, not pathological, though opposite reactions to shame underlie many conflicts among individuals and groups, and some styles of handling shame are clearly maladaptive. Illustrating his argument with examples from everyday life, Lewis draws on his own pathbreaking studies and the theory and research of many others to construct the first comprehensive and empirically based account of emotional development focused on shame. In this paperback edition, Michael Lewis adds a compelling new chapter on stigma in which he details the process in which stigmatization produces shame.

“Entertaining, very informative, and essential for parents, fans, and players.” —Tony DiCicco, Head Coach, 1999 Women’s Cup Champions “Two thumbs up.... This book will broaden your knowledge of the game.” —Ron Newman, all-time winningest American Soccer Coach “This book will help people to understand why soccer is the world’s sport and why we love it so much.” —Tiffeny Milbrett, Forward, U.S. Women’s National Team “Fans will love it, and those who want to become fans will devour it.” —Bob Ley, ESPN/ABC Broadcaster Simplicity alone doesn’t explain soccer’s enormous popularity worldwide. Soccer is a game that can be as frustrating as golf, as physical as football and hockey, as sporadic as baseball, and as graceful as basketball. It can also be addictive. Whether you are a youth league player, a soccer parent, or a World Cup fan, here, at last, is the book you’ve been waiting for. Written by New York Daily News soccer columnist Michael Lewis with the full support and participation of the United States Soccer Federation, Soccer For Dummies shows you how to: Get a handle on soccer rules and regulations Learn the basic moves and plays Improve dribbling, passing, and other basic skills Find a league to play in Coach kids effectively Get more out of the game as a spectator Featuring expert tips from U.S. Men’s and Women’s National Soccer Team stars and packed with hundreds of action photos and illustrations, Soccer For Dummies is the ultimate beginner’s guide to the sport. You’ll discover: The where and wear of soccer Laws of the game Footwork, passing, shooting, receiving, goal tending, and other game fundamentals Staying in soccer shape Teamwork and strategy Coaching youth soccer Everything the informed spectator should know The current state of soccer at all levels from youth leagues to geriatric leagues Get Soccer For Dummies and get the lowdown on the world’s most popular sport from some of its most celebrated players.

Which Song is the Best and Why? Read it and see! Organized by rank, from 1 to 100, this illustrated celebration of the best songs by the boys who revolutionized rock-and-roll includes expert commentary, historical context, interview material, and lots of great sidebars (including "best" lists from some of today''s pop music powerhouses.) Like all "best of" lists, the book''s opinionated stance generates animated discussion. Here, There, and Everywhere is profusely illustrated with photos of the band at work and play, and all of the unforgettable album-cover art. Appendices include a complete song list, discography, videography, and bibliography, making it a one-stop source of Beatles facts and figures.

Although considered American soil, St. Lawrence Island in northern Alaska is geographically closer to Russia and home to the Northeast Cape Air Force Station. At this remote post, a group of servicemen intercept Soviet radio communications and translate Russian correspondence to English for military purposes. However, something suspicious is going on. Someone on the inside is sending classified information to an outside source. The first captain who finds a clue to the traitor’s identity is killed, and so begins a string of murderous attacks on the U.S. airmen stationed at the site. The CIA sends a criminal investigator to the Cape, but he is incapable of capturing the spy and ending the murders. Two officers must fight to stay alive long enough to uncover a ruthless killer and stop his brutality before all American’s secrets are revealed to the enemy.

"This is a dirty book about higher education." So begins Michael Lewis''s provocative new book, one that calls into question the conventional wisdom and about the excellence of American higher education. Lewis argues that teaching and research on America''s campuses are plagued by mis- and malfeasance. He further argues that these troubles are the paradoxical implications of professorial self-conceptions. The academic claim of moral and ethical specialness, according to Lewis, unexpectedly creates an environment where hack work or even no work at all is tolerated and in some cases actually rewarded. Through his chapters on "The Seven Pedagogical Sins" and "The Bad Joke of Scholarship, " the author traces the trajectory of the effects of collective denial on the quality of education in America. In his final chapter, Lewis offers a series of reforms intended to reverse faculty permissiveness.

Few people question the pervasive belief that early childhood exerts an inordinate power over adult achievements, relationships, and mental health. Once robbed of our potential by the inadequacies of our upbringing, the theory goes, we risk being trapped in maladaptive patterns and unfulfilling lives. But does early experience really seal our fate? Daring to challenge prevailing models of child development, this provocative book argues that what enables us to survive--and sets us free from our pasts--is our astonishing adaptability to change, shaped by the uniquely human attributes of consciousness, will, and desire.