Author of the week: Michael Lewis

last updated 8 January 2015

Michael Lewis is the first to admit he’s lived a charmed life, said Jessica Pressler in New York. He could have made a killing on Wall Street, but instead he made one excoriating the financial class in such books as Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, the latter a searing look at the causes of our current economic malaise. Though he’s considered a business writer, he seems most interested in people and how they behave. “People who are obsessed with success at every turn—I find that very off-putting,” he says. His new book, Boomerang, a collection of essays about the European debt crisis, makes him look once again like one of his stories’ heroes—the ones who see an unlikely opening and take advantage. “The timing for Boomerang is unbelievable—I’m going to be on Jon Stewart, and Greece is going to be leaving the euro,” he says. “Sometimes you get lucky in the moment.”

At this moment, everything Lewis touches seems to be turning to gold, said Zinta Lundborg in Bloomberg.com. The movie based on his baseball book, Moneyball, has been a hit with audiences and critics, and a movie adaptation of Liar’s Poker is finally close to being made. But Lewis still has his eye on the misdeeds of Wall Street and Washington. “The way the big firms meddled in the legislation to reform the financial industry after the crisis drives me batty,” he says. Batty enough to write a book about Wall Street’s remorselessness? It could be “psychologically interesting,” he says.