Michael Lewis writes about Iceland and the recent financial meltdown. Man, I’d love to go back there. [via marginal revolution]
Tag: michaellewis
Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (review: 4/5)
This makes the third Michael Lewis book I’ve read (see also my take on Moneyball and The Blind Side from last fall). It’s another good one. Liar’s Poker is Lewis’ first book. He writes about his years on Wall Street working with the Salomon Brothers investment firm during the heady 1980s. It’s a biography of the company’s internal breakdown and the revolutions that swept through the investment banking industry (like mortgage-backed securities and junk bonds) that made some people piles and piles of money.
Lewis’ writing is good and often funny:
The greatest of absurdity of the college investment banking interview was the people the investment banks sent to conduct them. Many of them hadn’t worked on Wall Street for more than a year, but they had acquired Wall Street personas. One of their favorites words was professional. Sitting stiffly, shaking firmly, speaking crisply, and sipping a glass of ice water are professional. Laughing and scratching your armpits are not…
I did not learn much from my stack of Wall Street rejection letters except that investment bankers were not in the market for either honesty or my services (not that the two were otherwise related). Set questions were posed to which set answers were expected. A successful undergraduate investment banking interview sounded like a monastic chant.
Lewis manages to get in to Salomon Brothers through some lucky connections, makes it through the months of lectures and hazing of the training program, and finally gets to the trading floor that’s dominated by a law-of-the-jungle ethos. Some of the best parts are these antics among the workers. People throwing phones at trainees, office pranks, verbal abuse, gluttony (“We’d order four hundred dollars of Mexican food,” says a former trader. “You can’t buy four hundred dollars of Mexican food. But we’d try—guacamole in five-gallon drums, for a start.”). It’s wonderfully disturbing.
If you are a self-possessed man with a healthy sense of detachment from your bank account and someone writes you a check for tens of millions of dollars, you probably behave as if you have won a sweepstakes, kicking your feet in the air and laughing yourself to sleep at night at the miracle of your good fortune. But if your sense of self-worth is morbidly wrapped up in your financial success, you probably believe you deserve everything you get. You take it as a reflection of something grand inside you. You acquire gravitas and project it like a cologne.
Lewis nails both the bizarre sociology inside the firm and the broader industry shifts. A lot of the stuff about mortgage bonds and junk bonds gives a good background on what’s happening on the market right now. Definitely worth reading.
The New Kings of Nonfiction (review: 3/5)
Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he’s had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting:
I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one thing it would’ve made titling this collection a lot easier. Sometimes people use the phrase “literary nonfictioni” for work like this, but I’m a snob when it comes to that phrase. I think it’s for losers. It’s pretentious, for one thing, and it’s a bore. Which is to say, it’s exactly the opposite of the writing it’s trying to describe. Calling a piece of writing “literary nonfiction” is like daring you to read it.
Not only is it a pretty good collection, but almost all of them are available online, in their entirety. Someone is listening to my prayers. My comments on each, roughly listed from Must Read to Don’t Bother…
“Losing the War” is easily my favorite work in the book (made obvious by the dog-ears). And I tend to have severe World War II nausea, so I was surprised to like it so much. Lee Sandlin explores the “collective anxiety attack” of the war, the impressions of the war that Americans got through the weak, cheerful reporting from the frontlines, and how we remember and how we forget. Highly recommended.
In one of the better tales in the book, Michael Lewis wrote about “Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities.” Lebed, at 15 years old, was called out by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock market manipulation and doesn’t seem very much phased by it. Fun story.
Jack Hitt‘s “Toxic Dreams: A California Town Finds Meaning in an Acid Pit” is another good one that covers ballooning litigation over the Stringfellow Acid Pit, a local dumping ground made to spur business. Naturally, with a name like that, you’re going to end up with a lawsuit. This one has 4,000 plaintiffs and doesn’t look to end anytime soon. Recommended.
Susan Orlean profiles a ten-year-old in “The American Man, Age Ten.” Interesting voice in this one.
Michael Pollan bought a cow and writes about its journey from birth to beef in “Power Steer.” And he touches on how our food chain all interconnects and the twin scourges of oil and cheap corn.
Though I’m not much for card games, I did like James McManus‘ story in “Fortune’s Smile.” McManus learns the ins and outs of no-limit hold’em and enters the World Series of Poker, and walks out with $250,000. A lot of the lingo flew over my head, but the spirit is right and the story is good.
“Tales of the Tyrant” is Mark Bowden‘s profile of Saddam Hussein. The scale of the vanity and self-delusion are incredible. It makes the guy a lot more human and a lot more disgusting. Pretty good read.
“Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy” is Chuck Klosterman‘s profile of Val Kilmer. I’d recommend it, keeping in mind what Ira Glass says about Klosterman in the introduction: When Klosterman does reporting, the superstructure of ideas and the aggressiveness with which he states those ideas are a big part of what makes the stories stand out.”
“Shapinsky’s Karma” [excerpt] by Lawrence Weschler follows an improbably cheerful, persistent Indian man who has found his calling in promoting the artwork of Harold Shapinksy, an undiscovered peer of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others, who is in his 80s at the time.
Bill Buford reports on hanging out with a bunch of rowdy Manchester United loyalists in “Among the Thugs.” It takes a while to warm up, but the later bits about group psychology and inevitable soccer mob violence are good (and downright scary).
“Host,” by David Foster Wallace, is the longest in the book (surprise!). It’s a profile of a conservative radio personality in California. I couldn’t get much into it, but I do like this bit from one of the many sidebars:
It’s hard to understand Fox News tags like “Fair and Balanced,” “No-Spin Zone,” and “We Report, You Decide” as anything but dark jokes, ones that delight the channel’s conservative audience precisely because their claims to objectivity so totally enrage liberals, whose own literal interpretation of the tag lines makes the left seems dim, humorless, and stodgy.
Dan Savage‘s “My Republican Journey” is about being homosexual and infiltrating a local Republican group. Eh.
“Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg” is Malcolm Gladwell’s exploration of one woman’s social network. Not recommended.
“The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a Hot Spot” by Coco Henson Scales is okay, but feels out of place here and doesn’t measure up to the other writing in the book.
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (review:3.5/5)
I’m prone to reading phases, veering off on thematic streaks. Do other people do this? For example, in the past year I read through the Edward Tufte corpus pretty much back-to-back (reviewed Beautiful Evidence and Envisioning Information), all but one of Steven Johnson’s (reviewed The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You), the Scott McCloud comics trilogy (Understanding Comics, Making Comics, Reinventing Comics), etc. I’ve also had a religion/science kick and a language/grammar phase within the past year.
So after wrapping up Michael Lewis‘ The Blind Side, this weekend I finished his earlier book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The question at hand: “What is the most efficient way to spend money on baseball players?”
The central character is the hands-on Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane. His story—that of the gifted athlete adored by scouts who crumbles in the majors—sours him on old-school baseball scouting and management. Beane discards baseball’s long heritage of subjectivity and gut instinct (e.g. “the good face“), and tries the objective, stat-crunching approach.
Winding in and out of this story, Lewis explores the work of baseball writer Bill James, the roots of the Society for American Baseball Research, and touches on sabermetrics. If anything, I wish there were more numbers in this book. I would have loved to dig in to some tables and really follow the statistical arguments. But at its heart, Lewis’ book is not a peer-reviewed research article, but a story. A pretty good one.
And as a tangential bonus, Lewis gives an little off-hand bit of writing wisdom:
“If you write well enough about a single subject, even a subject seemingly as trivial as baseball statistics, you needn’t write about anything else.”
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (review: 4/5)
I have never cared that much about football. Playing can be a blast, but I never watch it and I have only a vague sense of when the college & pro seasons begin. So, I was surprised that I enjoyed this book so much. The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game has a couple of stories going on. One, it’s about the evolution of football. And it’s also about race and class in America.
Michael Lewis starts with the evolution of the NFL strategy and the market for players. The NFL has roots as a rushing game, but later changes in official rules and informal bias led to the rise of passing and the notable West Coast offense. The new passing offense of the NFL befuddled some observers—quarterbacks thought to be below-average were able to perform well beyond expectations. And great quarterbacks, even better. It was the system, with all the right parts in place, that made it all work.
With passing as the preeminent strategy, you need premium quarterbacks. And with high-value quarterbacks, the opposition fields players (e.g. Lawrence Taylor) who want to destroy those quarterbacks. Which means that the formerly hum-drum role of left tackle becomes essential, as the protector of the quarterback’s blind side. And the demand in the NFL trickles down through college and into the high school level.
Enter Michael Oher, one of the top left tackle prospects in years. Explosive, nimble, flexible. Oh, and also 6’6″ and 322lbs. But he could have been stereotypical fall-out of inner city neglect. He was one of 13 kids with no father raised by a junkie mother in a blighted, predominantly black area of Memphis. Not good, all too common. But, through happenstance he got connected with a white family with money, social connections, high expectations, and a deep, abiding love—a social version of the West Coast offense. A potential statistic becomes a potential star.
Mark Larson 