Hitting the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list at #2 this week is Michael Lewis’s newest The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (Norton; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Libraries are showing holds as high as 17:1, and generally well above a 3:1 standard.

The book explores the work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the question, as the NYT frames it, of “Why do most people, from sports managers to bankers, so often overlook the data and make colossal errors based on gut instinct?”

The two found, “In study after study,” the review goes on, “that when it comes to making decisions, humans are predisposed to irrationality. Their surprising findings have had profound implications for everything from behavioral economics and politics, to advanced medicine and sports.”

Indeed, as Lewis wrote in Vanity Fair, their work, although he did not know it at the time, is behind the ideas explored in Moneyball.

But the reason that people are enthusiastic about Lewis’s book may be due to his ability to bring the emotional to what may seem like a dry subject. Jennifer Senior writes in her NYT review, “During its final pages, I was blinking back tears, hardly your typical reaction to a book about a pair of academic psychologists. The reason is simple. Mr. Lewis has written one hell of a love story, and a tragic one at that. The book is particularly good at capturing the agony of the one who loves the more ”

Readers may know one of the subjects of the book, Nobel prize-winner Kahneman for his own bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Lewis has made many appearances for the book, including the following on CSB This Morning earlier in the month:

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2016 at 4:14 pm and is filed under 2016 - Fall, Nonfiction, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.