Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

More ways Wall Street can screw you

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

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I’ve been procrastinating writing this review because, while Michael Lewis is one of my favorite nonfiction writers, this book proved to be a bit of a struggle for me. Maybe that’s because I’m too jaded to be surprised that banks and stock traders had found yet another way to screw over the little guy. Maybe it’s because everything I know about the stock market I learned from Trading Places, so if it’s not about pork bellies or frozen concentrated orange juice, it doesn’t arouse my […]

The world is full of garbage people.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

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So, I don’t mean the world is full of people made of garbage.  I mean that many human beings, too many (though that is probably subjective), are living embodiments of Mos Eisely, wretched hives of scum and villainy.  These two books by Michael Lewis are about those people. The Big Short, now a movie that I have not seen, is about the people who, in a way, foresaw the financial recession of 2008 and profited from it.  Immensely.  Funny though, those people are not the […]

A great book about two things I am terrible at: money and math. #CBRBingo – True Story

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

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Smart people who think outside the box are so much fun to read about. I read this book really fast, and it was enjoyable to read the whole way through. I’ve never read a Michael Lewis book before, but I might consider reading more now. He has a simple, clean style that is really efficient at getting his story across, and he has an instinct for the best way to use his material. And he has some great underlying material here. As he notes in […]

“We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence” (a Bromance)

The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

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Behavioral economics is such a popular topic nowadays that noted economist and student of human behavior Richard Thaler was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in the field in 2017. I first became interested in the topic that same year when I was asked to give a presentation at work, and I started by reading Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational (read my review here!). Back in the 1970s, though, the suggestion that people, as a general rule, behave irrationally in all sorts […]

would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack open each other’s skulls?

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

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As the US government shut down drags on, I figured it was time to learn more about the threat the Trump presidency poses to the day-to-day running of America. Turns out that, like basically every political story from anywhere in the world at the moment, it’s significantly worse than I thought.   Michael Lewis books are almost their own specific little sub-genre now – relatively light and readable looks at deeply boring topics. The Fifth Risk has less of an overarching narrative than previous works […]

Maybe we don’t think so good

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

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This book, by the author of Moneyball, is essentially a biography of the two men who did more to change the way we think about thinking.  Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are Israeli psychologists who discovered heuristics and connected the fields psychology and economics, helping create the new field of behavioral economics.  If you recognize either name, it is probably Daniel Kahneman who wrote the outstanding book Thinking, Fast and Slow a few years ago.  At the beginning of that book he writes about his […]



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