A shrewd observer of politics, finance and the American scene, Michael Lewis combines keen insight with his signature wit, making him one of today’s leading social commentators.A renowned best-selling author, Lewis is also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Slate and Bloomberg.
His latest book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (2011), based on articles Lewis wrote for Vanity Fair regarding the global debt crisis in Greece, Iceland and Germany, captures the nonsensical madness that spread across both sides of the Atlantic during the last decade, as individuals, institutions and entire nations mindlessly embraced instant gratification over long-term planning.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010), is a darkly humorous account of how the event that was considered impossible—the free fall of the American economy—finally occurred. He proves that truth really is stranger than fiction with a razor-sharp analysis of the heroes and villains that drove America’s economy overboard.
Lewis first made a name for himself in 1989 with the chart-topping Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street, an inside look at his career as a bond trader that best-selling author Tom Wolfe called “the funniest book on Wall Street I’ve ever read,” and earned Lewis the label of “America’s poet laureate of capital” from The Los Angeles Times. Liar’s Poker spent 62 weeks on The New York Times Best-Seller List and remains one of the signature books of the 1980s.
Lewis traversed the 1980s’ get-rich-quick jungle with The Money Culture (1992); chronicled the 1996 presidential campaign in Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House; crafted a 20-week New York Times Best-Seller in 2001 with The New, New Thing (“The book that does for Silicon Valley what Liar’s Poker did for Wall Street.”); explored the internet boom in Next: The Future Just Happened (2002).
Lewis’ 2003 bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of a Major League Baseball franchise. This New York Times best-seller details the effect that an innovative personnel approach has had in allowing the small-budget Oakland Athletics to consistently rank among baseball’s best. Moneyball became a major motion picture in 2011 starring Brad Pitt and holds the record for the largest opening weekend for a baseball movie ever.
In 2006, Lewis took his second dive into the world of professional sports with The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. He delves into the substructure of football and tells the inspirational true story of Baltimore Raven Michael Oher. The 2009 film adaptation of The Blind Side, starring Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw and Kathy Bates, broke the box office record for the biggest opening weekend of a sports film in history.
Lewis’ 2009 release Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood (May 2009), is a compilation of stories he wrote for his column “Dad Again” in Slate, detailing the parenting realities thrust upon him—not always happily, but often hilariously—by the births of his three children.
A native of New Orleans, Michael Lewis graduated from Princeton University with a degree in art history and earned a master’s at The London School of Economics. Prior to his career as an author, he worked with The Salomon Brothers on Wall Street and in London. He lives in Berkeley with his wife Tabitha Soren and their three children.
On the stage, Lewis examines the era that was just brought to a crashing halt by the subprime and worldwide credit crisis. Starting with the years he chronicled in Liar’s Poker, he touches on the major economic events of the last twenty years, exploring what this period was all about, how it began and how it’s likely to end. He masterfully transforms complex issues into accessible scenarios through clever and amusing observations and continues to call it as he sees it in recounting Wall Street’s excesses.
In a separate program, Lewis takes audiences into the world of Moneyball. It is the story of how the Oakland A’s, the baseball team with the lowest budget in the league, consistently makes it into the playoff’s every year. Yet it is an exploration of the nature of talent, the assumptions people hold and how they get in the way of success, and how to identify talent and maintain and edge in a competitive field.
