Michael Lewis

Different people want to know different things when you tell them you're having lunch with Michael Lewis. Financial guys who read his "Liar's Poker" wonder whether he regrets becoming an ink-stained wretch when he could have remained a bond salesman and been filthy rich by now. MTV fans want to know what it's like being married to Tabitha "Rock the Vote" Soren.

Presidents get the praise or blame for everything that happens on their watch, but, as Barack Obama has learned, the things the commander in chief can actually command are limited in number, thanks to James Madison and Newt Gingrich.  Madison and his brilliant colleagues who invented the American system of government disagreed about many things, but they fervently agreed about one big thing: the coercive power of government needed to be held in...

Growing up in New Orleans, writer Michael Lewis learned three lessons that stuck with him for life: Success and happiness are very different things. Never become a lawyer. You don't need to come from a bookish environment to know how to spin a helluva story. Maybe the storytelling part, Lewis speculates, stems from another thing New Orleans taught him. With its Creole-Cajun culture and hedonistic ethos, the Crescent City schooled him to view his native country like a skeptical foreigner trying to make sense of outlandish things that appear normal to the rest of America.

It was the advice of relatively junior aides and the memory of the U.S. standing idle during the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s that helped push President Obama toward the bombing of Moammar Kadafi's army, which staved off a potential slaughter in the undefended city of Benghazi, Libya, last year, according to a Vanity Fair article. The article by Michael Lewis portrays Obama as an introspective soul, who purportedly pays little heed to political ramifications in making the biggest decisions, finds wisdom outside the regular centers of power and focuses on some of his most important decisions by writing.

OVER the last two decades, Michael Lewis has become an all-star at what the pros call immersion journalism. He is able to burrow into a cultural ecosystem, zero in on the most colorful characters available and use them to lay bare the intricacies of that world for us civilians. His bestsellers have demystified -- among other exotic precincts -- Wall Street ("Liar's Poker"), modern baseball ("Moneyball") and Silicon Valley ("The New New Thing").

This is a nonfiction volume about the varied misunderstandings and frayed nerves that afflict the business relationship between America and Japan. It's more than a pleasure to read; it's a laugh riot. Michael Lewis must have--at some point--totally ditched the notion that a journalist has to take all this seriously, or that something bad might happen if somebody's feelings get hurt.

In the movie "City Slickers," a serene old cowboy tells an anxious 39-year-old advertising man that life doesn't take on meaning until a person finds "that one thing." Wisely, the old cowboy declines to say what that one thing is. Perhaps not so wisely, psychiatrist-author Michael Lewis thinks he knows what it is, and he's eager to share his insight. In "Shame: The Exposed Self" he offers not only a diagnosis of America's social ills, but also a prescription to cure them.

Writing about the Internet is the literary equivalent of catching a shooting star in a split-second freeze frame. Understanding the Internet can only be as inconclusive. The Internet, that giant network of networks, is an instrument of our connectivity and our isolation, according to Michael Lewis in "Next: The Future Just Happened."

Home Game An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood Michael Lewis W.W. Norton: 188 pp., $23.95 -- Pity the poor modern dad. Or at least Michael Lewis, bestselling author and father of three whose cranky and mostly clumsy attempts to live up to the current ideal of fatherhood are breezily and brutally described in the new memoir "Home Game."

An Oakland man mistook a flight to "Auckland" for one to his hometown and added 12,000 miles to his journey from a holiday in West Germany, customs officials said Tuesday. Michael Lewis, 22, was at Los Angeles International Airport intending to fly to the Bay area city, 400 miles north, when Air New Zealand officials allowed him to board an aircraft bound for Auckland. Not until Tahiti was mentioned during an in-flight announcement did Lewis realize his predicament.

Growing up in New Orleans, writer Michael Lewis learned three lessons that stuck with him for life: Success and happiness are very different things. Never become a lawyer. You don't need to come from a bookish environment to know how to spin a helluva story. Maybe the storytelling part, Lewis speculates, stems from another thing New Orleans taught him. With its Creole-Cajun culture and hedonistic ethos, the Crescent City schooled him to view his native country like a skeptical foreigner trying to make sense of outlandish things that appear normal to the rest of America.

Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer-winning novel "A Visit From the Goon Squad" and Michael Lewis' "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine," which tells the story of savvy investors who foresaw the financial meltdown and cashed in on it, were among the winners Friday at the 31st annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. The awards to Egan in the fiction category and to Lewis in current interest were among a dozen handed out in a ceremony at The Times' Harry Chandler Auditorium, kicking off the Festival of Books this weekend at the University of Southern California.

With "The Big Short" at No. 1 on the L.A. Times bestseller list and two No. 1 books on the New York Times' lists -- his tale of Wall Street's recent meltdown and "The Blind Side" -- Michael Lewis is certainly surfing the zeitgeist these days. In "The Big Short," he follows a tiny handful of savvy investors who saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming and placed bets on the coming collapse. As their detective work unfolds, Berkeley-based Lewis, 49, reveals how that market worked: Investment firms packaged high-risk loans into securities and persuaded the ratings agencies to give them a low-risk Triple A rating.

I have to admit that when Michael DeLuca called me earlier this year, saying he was finally going to get "Moneyball" made into a movie, I figured he must've been smoking the proverbial Hollywood crack pipe. Anyone who loves baseball has read Michael Lewis' bestseller about how Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane almost single-handedly upended the traditional way baseball evaluates athletic talent.

Home Game An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood Michael Lewis W.W. Norton: 188 pp., $23.95 -- Pity the poor modern dad. Or at least Michael Lewis, bestselling author and father of three whose cranky and mostly clumsy attempts to live up to the current ideal of fatherhood are breezily and brutally described in the new memoir "Home Game."

OVER the last two decades, Michael Lewis has become an all-star at what the pros call immersion journalism. He is able to burrow into a cultural ecosystem, zero in on the most colorful characters available and use them to lay bare the intricacies of that world for us civilians. His bestsellers have demystified -- among other exotic precincts -- Wall Street ("Liar's Poker"), modern baseball ("Moneyball") and Silicon Valley ("The New New Thing").

Misadventure made Michael Lewis famous. Now it's making him miserable. The tale of how an exhausted Sacramento college student misheard a series of airport announcements and found himself bound for Auckland instead of Oakland became an instant pop legend last week. Lewis was hot. The day after his mixed-up odyssey ended, he appeared on "The Tonight Show." Then he signed a contract with a Hollywood producer for a TV movie. Promotional trips to New York and Chicago were planned.

Presidents get the praise or blame for everything that happens on their watch, but, as Barack Obama has learned, the things the commander in chief can actually command are limited in number, thanks to James Madison and Newt Gingrich.  Madison and his brilliant colleagues who invented the American system of government disagreed about many things, but they fervently agreed about one big thing: the coercive power of government needed to be held in...

Michael Lewis' slim volume "Coach" is both a paean to his high school baseball coach Billy Fitzgerald (a.k.a. Coach Fitz) and a reflection on the important role that coaches play in the sentimental education of our children. Lewis encountered Fitz in the late 1970s as a student at Isidore Newman, a tony New Orleans prep school.

A consumer's guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it's in play here. One exception: No products will be endorsed. What: "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" Author: Michael Lewis Publisher: W.W. Norton Price: $24.95 Michael Lewis is a respected financial writer who usually focuses on what takes place on Wall Street rather than what takes place in the sports world.