Michael Lewis (author)
Michael Lewis (born 1960, New Orleans, Louisiana) is an American contemporary non-fiction author. His bestselling books include Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.
After graduating from the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, he received an art history degree from Princeton University and a Masters Degree in Economics from the London School of Economics.
He went on to become a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in London, an experience he described in his first book, Liar's Poker. The book has since become a must read for anyone aspiring to become a Financier. Even while at Salomon Brothers, he continued to work nights and weekends as a journalist, a job that continues to this day, with pieces for magazines like The New York Times Magazine.
In the New New Thing (1999) he investigated the then-booming Silicon Valley technological scene and discussed the obsession with finding the next great innovation. He considered this phenomenon both from the perspective of the computer engineers actually making the new products and the entrepreneurs who invested in them.
Four years later, Lewis again entered the cultural mainstream with Moneyball, in which he investigated the dramatic success of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's, a baseball team which won consistently despite not being particularly well-funded by Major League Baseball standards. He noted the influence of prior baseball thinkers like Bill James on the Oakland front office, which used their arguments to find under-rated value in baseball players. In contrast to other teams which still considered potential players almost entirely on their physical abilities (such as speed and strength), Beane considered prior performance at the college and high school level. This allowed him to find players who though their physical skills might have been ordinary were still able to play at an extraordinarily high value. James also argued that certain skills, such as the ability to get on base, were equally valuable as the ability to hit, though most baseball decision-makers used to consider the latter dramatically more important. Beane was thus able to find players who were able to provide high value for bargain-basement prices. Lewis considered these examples, among others, as testaments to the possibility of equalizing necessarily unfair playing fields to the point that the cash-poor A's often defeated much wealthier teams.
Lewis is currently a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Bloomberg, and a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lewis married the former Tabitha Soren (now Tabitha Lee Lewis) on October 4 1997. Together they have two daughters, Quinn Tallulah (b. 1999) and Dixie (b. April 2002) and a son, Walter Jack Lewis. They currently live in Berkeley, California.
[edit] Books
- 1989: Liar's Poker
- 1990 "Pacific Rift"
- 1992: The Money Culture
- 1997: Trail Fever (also published as Losers)
- 1999: The New New Thing
- 2001: Next: The Future Just Happened
- 2003: Moneyball
- 2005: Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life
- 2006: The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
[edit] Stories
- 2005: Wading Toward Home
