The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

The #1 New York Times bestseller: a brilliant account—character-rich and darkly humorous—of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff.

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 best-selling Liar’s Poker. Who got it right? he asks. Who saw the 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.[]

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Outliers: The Story of Success

In this stunning new book Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like and too little attention to where they are from: that is their culture their family their generation and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires what it takes to be a great soccer player why Asians are good at math and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Brilliant and entertaining Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

• ISBN13: 9780316017923


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Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy

President Bill Clinton gives us his views on the challenges facing the United States today and why government matters—presenting his ideas on restoring economic growth job creation financial responsibility resolving the mortgage crisis and pursuing a strategy to get us "back in the future business.” He explains how we got into the current economic crisis and offers specific recommendations on how we can put people back to work increase bank lending and corporate investment double our exports restore our manufacturing base and create new businesses. He supports President Obama’s emphasis on green technology saying that changing the way we produce and consume energy is the strategy most likely to spark a fast-growing economy while enhancing our national security.

Clinton also stresses that we need a strong private sector and a smart government working together to restore prosperity and progress demonstrating that whenever we’ve given in to the temptation to blame government for all our problems we’ve lost our ability to produce sustained economic growth and shared prosperity.

Clinton writes “There is simply no evidence that we can succeed in the twenty-first century with an antigovernment strategy” based on “a philosophy grounded in ‘you’re on your own’ rather than ‘we’re all in this together.’ ” He believes that conflict between government and the private sector has proved to be good politics but has produced bad policies giving us a weak economy with not enough jobs growing income inequality and poverty and a decline in our competitive position. In the real world cooperation works much better than conflict and “Americans need victories in real life.”[]

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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

"One of the best baseball—and management—books out....Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."—Forbes

Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics their larger-than-life general manger Billy Beane and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts Michael Lewis has written 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).

I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began really with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball the Oakland Athletics win so many games?

With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest smartest and most contrarian book since well since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams and the dugouts perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but 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 geek numbers show—no 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 has 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.

Billy paid attention to those numbers —with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players is written off by just about everyone and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.

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?[]

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Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

As Pogo once said "We have met the enemy and he is us."

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 piñata 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.[]

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Steve Jobs: A Biography

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years--as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members friends adversaries competitors and colleagues--Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers animated movies music phones tablet computing and digital publishing.



At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.



Although Jobs cooperated with this book he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly sometimes brutally so about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends foes and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions perfectionism obsessions artistry devilry and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.



Driven by demons Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated just as Apple's hardware and software tended to be as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary filled with lessons about innovation character leadership and values.[]

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