“What are Michael Lewis’s Best Books?” We looked at all of Lewis’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!

We took all of the books written by Michael Lewis and looked at their Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.

The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

The Top Book’s Of Michael Lewis

17 ) Pacific Rift

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 17
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 16

Can we really succeed in opening up Japan to U.S. business? Not likely, says Michael Lewis. After all, if neither Commodore Perry nor General MacArthur could do it, what chance do trade negotiators have? Lewis’s satirical journeys through the world financial markets, documented in Liar’s Poker and The Money Culture, provide him with a unique window on the increasingly strained relationship between the world’s two largest trading nations. In Pacific Rift, Lewis follows the fortunes of two cultural transplants: Bob Collins, a forthright American insurance executive who lives and works in Tokyo, and Shuji Tomikawa, a Harvard-educated Japanese man working for Mitsui Real Estate in New York City. From the Ginza hostess bars of Tokyo to the wino gangs of Times Square, Lewis’s wit pierces the mountain of rhetoric surrounding U.S.-Japanese relations to reveal a disquieting, tragicomic grassroots collision of two disparate cultures and two conflicting interpretations of capitalism.

16 ) Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 15
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 14

An analysis of five financial upheavals in recent history includes coverage of the 1987 stock market crash, the 1998 Russian default (and the consequent collapse of U.S. hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management), the Asian currency crisis of 1999, the Internet bubble of 1995-2001, and the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis, in an anecdotal report that reveals how public knowledge differed from what was actually taking place.

15 ) The Money Culture

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 16
• Amazon: 11
• LibraryThing: 15

Focuses on events and individuals in the financial news of the 1980s.

14 ) Losers: The Road to Everyplace But the White House

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 8
• Amazon: 13
• LibraryThing: 17

Michael Lewis is a master at dissecting the absurd: after skewering Wall Street in his national bestseller Liar’s Poker, he packed his mighty pen and set out on the 1996 campaign trail. As he follows the men who aspire to the Oval Office, Lewis discovers an absurd mix of bravery and backpedaling, heroic possibility and mealy-mouthed sound bytes, and a process so ridiculous and unsavory that it leaves him wondering if everyone involved—from the journalists to the candidates to the people who voted—isn’t ultimately a loser. The contenders: Pat Buchanan: becomes the first politician ever to choose a black hat over a white one. Phil Gramm: spends twenty million dollars to convince voters of his fiscal responsibility. John McCain: makes the fatal mistake of actually speaking his mind. Alan Keyes: checks out of a New Hampshire hotel and tells the manager another candidate will be paying his bill. Steve Forbes: refuses to answer questions about his father’s motorcycles. Bob Dole: marches through the campaign without ever seeming to care. Losers is a wickedly funny, unflinching look at how America really goes about choosing a President.

12 ) Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 11
• Amazon: 9
• LibraryThing: 13

A story with a big heart about a boy, a coach, the game of baseball, and the game of life. “There are teachers with a rare ability to enter a child’s mind; it’s as if their ability to get there at all gives them the right to stay forever.”

12 ) The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 12
• Amazon: 9
• LibraryThing: 12

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis set out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world’s most important technology entrepreneur. He found this in Jim Clark, a man whose achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies. He also found much more, and the result-the New York Times best-selling book The New New Thing- is an ingeniously conceived history of the Internet revolution.

9 ) Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 14
• Amazon: 7
• LibraryThing: 11

An unsparing observation about the disparity between social expectation and the actual experiences of new fathers shares stories from the author’s life after the births of his three children.

9 ) Next: The Future Just Happened

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 13
• Amazon: 11
• LibraryThing: 8

With his knowing eye and wicked pen, Michael Lewis reveals how the Internet boom has encouraged changes in the way we live, work, and think. In the midst of one of the greatest status revolutions in the history of the world, the Internet has become a weapon in the hands of revolutionaries. Old priesthoods are crumbling. In the new order, the amateur is king: fourteen-year-olds manipulate the stock market and nineteen-year-olds take down the music industry. Unseen forces undermine all forms of collectivism, from the family to the mass market: one black box has the power to end television as we know it, and another one may dictate significant changes in our practice of democracy.

9 ) The Real Price of Everything: Rediscovering the Six Classics of Economics

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 10
• Amazon: 16
• LibraryThing: 6

In his New York Times bestsellers Liar’s Poker and Moneyball, Michael Lewis gave us an unprecedented look at what goes on behind the scenes on Wall Street. Now he takes us back across the centuries to explore the four classics that created and defined not just Wall Street, but the entire economic system we live under today. Brought together with Lewis’s illuminating editorial commentary, they form an essential reference for any student of economics—in fact, for anyone who wants to understand the market forces and government policies that have shaped our world, and will continue to shape our future.

8 ) Trail Fever

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 8
• Amazon: 13
• LibraryThing: 9

A wickedly funny and astute chronicle of the 1996 Presidential campaign – and how we go about choosing our leaders at the end of the 20th century. Beginning with the primaries, Lewis traveled across America – a concerned citizen who happened to ride in candidates’ airplanes (as well as rented cars in blinding New Hampshire blizzards) and write about their adventures.

7 ) The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 6
• Amazon: 7
• LibraryThing: 9

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.The Undoing Project is about a compelling collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield–both had important careers in the Israeli military–and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. Amos Tversky was a brilliant, self-confident warrior and extrovert, the center of rapt attention in any room; Kahneman, a fugitive from the Nazis in his childhood, was an introvert whose questing self-doubt was the seedbed of his ideas. They became one of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, working together so closely that they couldn’t remember whose brain originated which ideas, or who should claim credit. They flipped a coin to decide the lead authorship on the first paper they wrote, and simply alternated thereafter.This story about the workings of the human mind is explored through the personalities of two fascinating individuals so fundamentally different from each other that they seem unlikely friends or colleagues. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind.

6 ) Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 7
• Amazon: 5
• LibraryThing: 7

Presents the author’s darkly humorous investigation of the effects of the 2008 financial bubble on other countries before taking aim at greedy debtors in California and Washington, D.C.

4 ) Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 4

The author recounts his experiences on the lucrative Wall Street bond market of the 1980s, where young traders made millions quickly and easily, in a humorous account of greed and epic folly.

4 ) The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 3
• Amazon: 5
• LibraryThing: 4

Follows one young man from his impoverished childhood with a crack-addicted mother, through his discovery of the sport of football, to his rise to become one of the most successful, highly-paid players in the NFL.

3 ) Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 5
• Amazon: 3
• LibraryThing: 3

A small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders the big Wall Street banks expose this institutionalized injustice and go to war to fix it.

1 ) The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 1
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 2

The author examines the causes of the U.S. stock market crash of 2008 and its relation to overpriced real estate, bad mortgages, shareholder demand for excessive profits, and the growth of toxic derivatives.

1 ) Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 2
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 1

This book explains how Billy Beene, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, is using a new kind of thinking to build a successful and winning baseball team without spending enormous sums of money. The author examines the fallacy behind the major league baseball refrain that the team with the biggest wallet is supposed to win. Over the past four years the Oakland Athletics, a major league team with a minor league payroll, have had one of the best records in the country. General Manager Billy Beene is putting into practice on the field revolutionary principles to build his team that have been concocted by geek statisticians and college professors, rather than using the old scouting technique called “gut instinct.” The author takes us behind the scenes with the Oakland A’s, into the dugouts, and into the conference rooms where the annual Major League draft is held by conference call, and rumor mongering is par for the course as each team jockeys for position for their favored player.I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it, before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? This book is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can’t buy: the secret of success in baseball.

Michael Lewis’s Best Books

Michael Lewis Review Website Bibliography Rankings