The Big Short

'Is it possible to read a book about the men who profited from the financial crisis and enjoy it so much that you laugh out loud? In the hands of Michael Lewis, anything is possible' Sunday Times'We fed the monster until it blew up ...'While Wall Street was busy creating the biggest credit bubble of all time, a few renegade investors saw it was about to burst, bet against the banking system - and made a fortune.From the jungles of the trading floor to the casinos of Las Vegas, this is the outrageous story of the misfits, mavericks and geniuses who, against all odds, made the greatest financial killing in history.

Short-listed for Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2010

“Hugely entertaining”

It's time to throw another tank of petrol on the Wall Street pyre, as only Lewis can Financial Times
He is so good everyone else may as well pack up Evening Standard
No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis -- Michiko Kakutani New York Times
Probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written Reuters
Economist
Terrifying and superbly told Daily Telegraph
Genius Sunday Times
Compelling and horrifying -- GQ
A more than worthy successor to Liar's Poker ... if you want to know about the origins of the credit crunch, and the extraordinary cast of misfits, visionaries and chancers who made money from the crash, there's no more readable account Daily Telegraph
A triumph ... riveting ... a genuine page-turner Times
The very best book about this whole affair -- John Lanchester, author of 'Whoops!'
If you read only one book about the causes of the recent financial crisis, let it be Michael Lewis's The Big Short Washington Post
In the hands of Michael Lewis, anything is possible ... if you want to know how a nation lost its financial mind - and have a good laugh finding out - this is the book to read. The Sunday Times
Magnificent ... a perfect storm of brilliant writer meeting big subject. The Guardian

Michael Lewis's global bestselling books lift the lid on the biggest stories of our times. They include Flash Boys, a game-changing expose of high-speed scamming; The Big Short, which was made into a hit Oscar-winning film; Moneyball, the story of a maverick outsider who beat the system; and Liar's Poker, the book that defined the excesses of the 1980s. Michael Lewis was born in New Orleans and educated at Princeton University and the London School of Economics.

'An enormously important book on politics and democracy. What makes it both interesting and brilliant reading is not Chou's abandonment of democracy but his scorching analysis of how democracy is misrepresented - the perversions and swindles made in its name against its real promise. Read this book and you will never again take democracy for granted.'Henry A. Giroux teaches at McMaster and Ryerson universities in Canada and his most recent book is The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination MachineA lively exploration of the reasons why some democracies self-destructThat all democracies have, by their very nature, the potential to destroy themselves is a fact too rarely documented by acolytes of the system. In the decades since Joseph Goebbels, then as Reich Minister of Propaganda, reminded the world that it 'will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed', democrats have quickly forgotten just how precarious a political framework it can be. Using as illustrative examples the collapse of democracy in ancient Athens and the Weimar Republic, as well as the uncertain fate of democratic rule in the United States and China today, this book examines the conditions and characteristics of democracy that make it prone to self-destruct. In drawing out the political lessons from these past collapses, Mark Chou explains how a democracy can, in the course of being democratic, sow the seeds of its own destruction.Mark Chou is Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Australian Catholic University. He is also the author of Greek Tragedy and Contemporary Politics (2012).Cover image: This isn't democracy

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