THE FIFTH RISK
UNDOING DEMOCRACY
MICHAEL LEWIS
Allen Lane, 219pp, £20 From his account of life on Wall St in
Liar’s Poker (1989) to his analysis of the American housing bubble in The
Big Short (2010), Michael Lewis has written bestselling books that manage to make the worlds of finance and business accessible and exciting to the lay reader. His latest,
The Fifth Risk, is about another ostensibly unsexy subject: US government infrastructure.
Lewis’s focus is on the Trump administration’s failure to prepare for government and its general disregard for the business of government. As Jennifer Szalai put it, reviewing the book in the New York
Times when it first came out, two years after Trump’s election to the presidency, ‘out of more than 700 key government positions requiring Senate confirmation, only 361 have been confirmed, and a full 152 have no nominee at all’.
Lewis also records how Trump systematically undermines the integrity of federal agencies by appointing as their heads either his cronies or those who have a direct financial interest in the policy areas they cover.
The Fifth Risk is short, and two of its parts have already been published as articles in Vanity Fair, leaving the whole thing feeling a little ‘underdone’, said Szalai. Nonetheless, Lewis ‘keeps the narrative moving, rendering even the most abstruse details of government risk assessment in the clearest (and therefore most terrifying) terms’. In the Daily Telegraph, Harriet Alexander wrote that Lewis ‘tells the story of the Trump team’s transition to power with cinematic brilliance. The characters are riveting, and the drama intense.’ Michael Hofmann chose it as one of his books of the year in the Times Literary Supplement: ‘Life is what happens between Michael Lewis books,’ wrote Hofmann.