The fifth risk - Michael Lewis

'Will set your hair on end' Telegraph, Top 50 Books of the Year
'I forgot to breathe while reading The Fifth Risk' Michael Hofmann, TLS, Books of the Year

The bestselling, no-holds-barred expos of the people who are wrecking our democracy, by the master storyteller of our times


'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.