Fifth Risk

£9.99

‘The election happened’, remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. ‘And then there was radio silence’. Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them. Michael Lewis’s narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders.

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‘Will set your hair on end’ Telegraph, Top 50 Books of the Year

‘Life is what happens between Michael Lewis books. I forgot to breathe while reading The Fifth Risk‘ Michael Hofmann, TLS, Books of the Year

The phenomenal new book from the international bestselling author of The Big Short

‘The election happened … And then there was radio silence.’

The morning after Trump was elected president, the people who ran the US Department of Energy – an agency that deals with some of the most powerful risks facing humanity – waited to welcome the incoming administration’s transition team. Nobody appeared. Across the US government, the same thing happened: nothing.

People don’t notice when stuff goes right. That is the stuff government does. It manages everything that underpins our lives from funding free school meals, to policing rogue nuclear activity, to predicting extreme weather events. It steps in where private investment fears to tread, innovates and creates knowledge, assesses extreme long-term risk.

And now, government is under attack. By its own leaders.

In The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis reveals the combustible cocktail of wilful ignorance and venality that is fuelling the destruction of a country’s fabric. All of this, Lewis shows, exposes America and the world to the biggest risk of all. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

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Additional information

Weight 0.191 kg
Dimensions 19.8 × 12.9 × 1.5 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

255

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

973.933 (edition:23)

Readership

College – higher education / Code: F