Book Review: The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis is very good at what he does. In this case, it takes much of his writer acumen and perspicacious observations to make this book better than good.

The topic is: why do people make the decisions that they do? A subject that he is quite acquainted with since his successful telling of the disturbing and head scratching tendencies of major league baseball decision makers to base their decisions on anything but measureable metrics in Moneyball. Actually, it was due to the fact that many people kept telling him to read Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work that he happened upon the two psychologists/economists.

While the subject matter piqued his interest, the story behind the two friends and their collaboration is what drives this story. It was pure and unadulterated love between two friends. It was the friendship of a lifetime, if we are lucky enough to find someone that we are so in tuned with in our working life.

To complicate things, Danny Kahneman had written a best seller titled Thinking: Fast and Slow. He had undertaken this book because he had received the Nobel prize in economics for the groundbreaking work that he and Tversky had done together over the years, but he got the Nobel and Tversky did not because he had passed away before the Nobel was awarded. Kahneman’s book is a dense but very readable- as readable as a research oriented book on human nature can be- tome on their collaborative partnership.

So Michael Lewis undertook a nearly impossible task, to combine a story of a friendship that is so complete while drilling down into the research in human behavior and doing the yeoman’s work of summarizing that work for the lay audience; AND do so without duplicating or infringing upon the book authored by one of his subjects,

By all accounts, he acquitted himself valiantly. This book is a clear eyed account of an admirable friendship and partnership. He was able to dig deep into their relationship, portray their collaboration honestly and also delve into what eventually led to the dissolution of that relationship. The pioneering work in psychology was also explained concisely but also precisely. No excessive words or digressions were employed in the recitation of the results; the experiments were explained cleanly and efficiently. The story of the research would seemingly be de-emphasized in view of the more audience pleasing aspect of the friendship, but Lewis managed to not have given short shrift to the academic results, a rather large component of the story.

In the end, the story worked in Lewis’ hands. He conveyed the emotions and pathos of the friendship while also regaled us with the significance and importance of the research. A very masterful accomplishment indeed.

Book Review:Draft #4 On the Writing Process by John McPhee

John McPhee is a master at his craft, which is what people call creative non-fiction. McPhee was creative about his non-fiction writing much before the phrase came into vogue.

McPhee’s body of work is respected as well as enjoyed, a pretty rare feat for non-fiction writers, as the nature of non-fiction is imbued with the ethos of “Just the facts”. What makes McPhee stand out is the depth of his exploration as well as the breadth of his curiosity on his topic at hand.

This book is a compendium of eight essays that he had written for The New Yorker magazine. They are all essays on writing, along with a good bit of storytelling, McPhee storytelling. They can be read as standalone essays or they can be read sequentially. I read it sequentially.

The structure of each essay is peculiarly McPhees, and as he explains how he comes to his structures I was suitably blown away by the amount of planning and the depth of preparation he does with his writing. It is akin to the plotting of a complex novel, each move is plotted and planned to give maximum effect to the reader. Of course, as he is describing the pains that he resorts to in order to create this structure and order, he gives us a glimpse into the his mind and how it is capable of such excellence.

This is not to say that this book is devoid of humor and fascination. McPhee has been at this for a long time and he tells his New Yorker stories with great relish. He talks about his interactions with gigantic New Yorker characters, like William Shawn, Robert Bingham, and Robert Gottlieb. He speaks of people he’d interviewed: Richard Burton, Elizabeth taylor, Jackie Gleason, and others. But those stories, while exciting and beguiling since they were about people we had known about, pales in comparison with his stories about McPhee’s people, geologists, ichthyologists, naturalists, people who are quietly good at what they do and they do so with a strong sense of purpose, people who are not ostentatious but are exceptional in their execution. The fact that he uses them as examples of how he writes speaks volumes about the people and subjects that are the most interesting to him, and in turn to us.

This is by no means a how to book for writing acolytes. This is a memoir of sorts, of a great writer as he speaks of his craft, and of his passion. He does lay out some well-worn paths that he had taken towards building his work habits but it is so uniquely his that it just serves as a point of discussion and inspiration for the rest of us. The most salient part is that he does so in his own inimitable style.

The bonus that came with this reading experience is the discovery of the meaning of the word sprezzatura. In many ways, McPhee showed thrown the book that even though it may seem like he undertakes his life’s work with great sprezzatura, the actual work is never done that way.