The Big Short

May 3, 2010
Although Lewis is perhaps best known for his sports-related nonfiction (including The Blind Side), his first book was the autobiographical Liar’s Poker, in which he chronicled his disillusionment as a young gun on Wall Street in the “greed is good” 1980s. He returns to his financial roots to excavate the crisis of 2007–2008, employing his trademark technique of casting a microcosmic lens on the personal histories of several Wall Street outsiders who were betting against the grain—to shed light on the macrocosmic tale of greed and fear. Although Lewis reads the book’s introduction, narration duties are assumed by Jesse Boggs, a veteran narrator of business titles (including Lewis’s own 2008 book Panic!). Boggs’s rich baritone is well suited to the task and trips lightly through a maze of financial jargon (CDOs, derivatives, mid-prime lending) and a dizzying cast of characters. Lewis returns on the final disc for a 10-minute interview about the crisis’s aftermath, including a savvy assessment of the wisdom of the financial bailout and where-are-they-now updates on the book’s various heroes and villains. A Norton hardcover.

Starred review from April 15, 2010
Versatile best-selling author Lewis ("Panic") gives a different take on the 2007-08 credit crisis as he chronicles how a handful of investment managers detected early on the growing bubble in the mortgage bond market and made fortunes betting against it. Lewis is a storyteller, and he weaves the personal stories of these renegades against the inner workings of Wall Street's mortgage-backed securities money machine. He explains in plain language how the industry obscured credit risk by packaging and repackaging low-quality subprime mortgages into complicated securities that could receive high credit ratings in a process he calls the financial alchemy equivalent of turning lead into gold. He says investors then looked at little more than the ratings as they bought billions of dollars' worth of these supposedly safe bonds. Lewis turns the crisis into a true financial thriller that screams of Wall Street's greed, recklessness, deceit, incompetence, and hubris. VERDICT Readers from generalists through specialists will find this fast-paced, engaging account both illuminating and disturbing. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 11/1/09.]Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA

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