And, again, it looks like it is going to be brilliant. He's written Liar's Poker, about the wide boys and mathematicians who worked out that the biggest pool of unexploited borrowing in America was mortgages, and who packaged it into bundles and so on. It's riveting because it's all about the credit crunch, but it is actually written about the seventies and a littler crash.
He's written Moneyball, in which stattos and mathematicians propel the Oakland As baseball team to unlikely success, given their resources, by understanding numbers better than anyone else and so spotting players whose skills were undervalued. And The Blind Side, about the recognition, via a reunderstanding of statistics etc., that the Left Tackle, a hitherto unglamorous position in American Football, was actually of vital importance and how this has led Left Tackles to become vastly better paid.
On one level, then, these books are about the same thing - find an angle, use it to see the world differently, exploit it - and I am sure they over-clarify for storytelling purposes, but I am also sure they are fundamentally right and revealing. Further, they are beautifully written, humane and based on exquisitely-drawn characters. I think they all started with long magazine articles which set out his stall. And now he's doing it for basketball. His protagonist is Shane Battier, whose statistics, measured by the usual things such as baskets, assists and rebounds, are useless, but whose teams win all the same. This feature, sent to me by a friend the other day and which I read for a page before realising it had to be by Lewis, is all about trying to find out what's going on. The result: I can't wait for the book and I love Shane Battier, basketball's Obama.
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