Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis, the bestselling author of The Undoing Project, Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.
All Books By Michael Lewis
Boomerang
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrator: Dylan Baker
- Length: 7 hours 10 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2011
- Language: English
- 3.9(23975 ratings)
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Big Short, Liar’s Poker and The Blind Side!
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.
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.
The trademark of Michael Lewis’s bestsellers is to tell an important and complex story through characters so outsized and outrageously weird that you’d think they have to be invented. (You’d be wrong.) In Boomerang, we meet a brilliant monk who has figured out how to game Greek capitalism to save his failing monastery; a cod fisherman who, with three days’ training, becomes a currency trader for an Icelandic bank; and an Irish real estate developer so outraged by the collapse of his business that he drives across the country to attack the Irish Parliament with his earth-moving equipment.
Lewis’s investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American listener to a comfortable complacency: Oh, those foolish foreigners. But when Lewis 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.
“No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Lewis.”
–Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Flash Boys
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrator: Dylan Baker
- Length: 10 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2014
- Language: English
- 4.14(46836 ratings)
2015 Audie Award Finalist for Nonfiction
From the #1 bestselling author of The Blind Side and Moneyball
Four years after his #1 bestseller The Big Short, Michael Lewis returns to Wall Street to report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity markets.
Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the US stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post-financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover each other, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading–source of the most intractable problems–will have no advantage whatsoever.
The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.
The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting story. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don’t get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it.
Has Anyone Seen the President?
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrator: Michael Lewis
- Length: 54 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
- 3.52(529 ratings)
Michael Lewis goes to Washington!
Who better to shine a light into the shadows of the nation’s capital in the age of Trump than the bestselling author of Liar’s Poker and The Big Short?
In this audio investigation–unavailable in book form–Lewis narrates his 2018 report from Washington originally published in Bloomberg View. From inside the White House press room–which Lewis describes as having “the cramped, uncared-for feel of a public toilet”–to a balcony overlooking “a sea of white people” in the Trump International Hotel, to Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill townhouse, where he joins the former campaign CEO to watch the State of the Union address, Lewis takes listeners on an unforgettable behind-the-scenes tour.
Panic!
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrator: Jesse Boggs
- Length: 7 hours 1 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2008
- Language: English
- 3.56(1583 ratings)
Featuring an exclusive interview with the author, “America’s poet laureate of capital” (The Los Angeles Times)
When it comes to markets, the first deadly sin is greed. In Panic!, #1 bestselling author Michael Lewis has chosen several pieces of brilliant journalism to illuminate the most violent and costly upheavals in recent financial history: the Crash of ’87, the Russian Default (and the subsequent collapse of Long Term Capital Management), the Asian Currency Crisis of 1999, the Internet Bubble, and the current Sub-Prime Mortgage Disaster. Among the unabridged selections are several pieces by Lewis himself, whose writing also introduces each section, as well as contributions from Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, James Surowiecki and others writing in Fortune, The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Some of the pieces paint the mood and market factors leading up to the particular crash, or show what people thought was happening at the time. Others, with the luxury of hindsight, analyze what actually happened. There are sobering messages common to these narratives: the lessons that should have been learned along the way were for the most part ignored; and when push comes to shove — when all investors run to the same side of the boat — the carefully devised protections against risk turn out to be wishful thinking.
As proved in Liar’s Poker, The New New Thing, and Moneyball, Lewis is without peer in his understanding of market forces and of human foibles. He is also, arguably, the funniest serious writer in America.
The Big Short
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrator: Jesse Boggs
- Length: 9 hours 27 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2010
- Language: English
- 4.29(76774 ratings)
Featuring an Exclusive Audio Interview with Michael Lewis
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: 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.
The crucial question is this: 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?
Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 bestselling Liar’s Poker. Who got it right? he asks. Who saw the ever-rising real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception? And what qualities of character made those few persist when their peers and colleagues dismissed them as Chicken Littles? Out of this 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 times.
Michael Lewis, “is the finest storyteller of our generation.”–Malcolm Gladwell
The Undoing Project
- By: Michael Lewis
- Narrator: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 10 hours 18 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2016
- Language: English
- 3.98(28388 ratings)
Bestselling author Michael Lewis examines how a Nobel Prize-winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized 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. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.
The Undoing Project is about the fascinating collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield–both had important careers in the Israeli military–and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind.