From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. As he did so memorably for baseball in Moneyball, Lewis takes a statistical X-ray of the hidden substructure of football, outlining the invisible doings of unsung players that determine the outcome more than the showy exploits of point scorers. In his sketch of the gridiron arms race, first came the modern, meticulously choreographed passing offense, then the ferocious defensive pass rusher whose bone-crunching quarterback sacks demolished the best-laid passing game, and finally the rise of the left tackle—the offensive lineman tasked with protecting the quarterback from the pass rusher—whose presence is felt only through the game-deciding absence of said sacks. A rare creature combining 300 pounds of bulk with "the body control of a ballerina," the anonymous left tackle, Lewis notes, is now often a team's highest-paid player. Lewis fleshes this out with the colorful saga of left tackle prodigy Michael Oher. An intermittently homeless Memphis ghetto kid taken in by a rich white family and a Christian high school, Oher's preternatural size and agility soon has every college coach in the country courting him obsequiously. Combining a tour de force of sports analysis with a piquant ethnography of the South's pigskin mania, Lewis probes the fascinating question of whether football is a matter of brute force or subtle intellect. Photos. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Next
The Future Just Happened

From Publishers Weekly
Putting an engaging and irreverent spin on yesterday's news, Lewis (Liar's Poker; The New, New Thing) declares that power and prestige are up for grabs in this look at how the Internet has changed the way we live and work. Probing how Web-enabled players have exploited the fuzzy boundary between reality and perception, he visits three teenagers who have assumed startling roles: Jonathan Lebed, the 15-year-old New Jersey high school student who made headlines when he netted $800,000 as a day trader and became the youngest person ever accused of stock-market fraud by the SEC; Markus Arnold, the 15-year-old son of immigrants from Belize who edged out numerous seasoned lawyers to become the number three legal expert on AskMe.com; and Daniel Sheldon, a British 14-year-old ringleader in the music-file-sharing movement. Putting himself on the line, Lewis is freshest in his reportage, though he doesn't pierce the deeper cultural questions raised by the kids' behavior. As a financial reporter tracing the development of innovative industries like black box interactive television and interactive political polling from their beginnings as Internet brainstorms, Lewis reminds readers that the twin American instincts to democratize and commercialize intertwine on the Internet, and can only lead to new business. In the past, Lewis implies, industry insiders would simply have shut out eager upstarts, yet today insiders, like AOL Time Warner, allow themselves "to be attacked in order to later co-opt their most ferocious attackers and their best ideas." (July 30)Forecast: Lewis's track record, a major media campaign and a 12-city author tour through techie outposts will make this hard to ignore. As a breezy summer read, it's fun enough, but those looking for profound business insights will be disappointed.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
The New New Thing
A Silicon Valley Story

The New York Times Book Review, Kurt Andersen
It is a splendid, entirely satisfying book, intelligent and fun and revealing and troubling in the correct proportions, resolutely skeptical but not at all cynical...

Wall Street Journal, Fred Moody, 22 October 1999
[R]emarkable....Clark proves to be a character as enthralling as any in American fiction or non-fiction....Lewis tells a great story in this book, with prose that ranges from the beautiful to the witty to the breathtaking.

The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, 26 October 1999
[Lewis] does for the late 1990s world of techno-geeks and software cowboys what he did in Liar's Poker for the 1980s Wall Street world of traders and arbitrageurs.

Time, Joshua Quittner, 25 October 1999
[A] superb book....[Lewis] makes Silicon Valley as thrilling and intelligible as he made Wall Street in his best-selling Liar's Poker.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, 31 October 1999
Lewis brilliantly describes Clark's intensity and passion, his genius for technology and leadership and his impatience with convention. He also faithfully chronicles Clark's ruthlessness, willingness to exact revenge on opponents and ability to casually upset people's lives. The fact that these last qualities are described in almost complimentary terms reflects a Silicon Valley sensibility that they're laudable.

Wired "Must Read," November 1999
...Michael Lewis takes readers inside the now-familiar world of Silicon Valley excess, the frantic deal making, the absurdly hyped expectations, the phenomenal wealth. But the 39-year old best-selling author of Liar's Poker and The Money Culture brings something genuinely exotic to the mix: near-total access to one of the Valley's biggest and most enigmatic players.

Joe Nocera, Slate, 25 October 1999
Michael Lewis' The New New Thing is the best book ever written about Silicon Valley. There. I've said it. Said it to you (wondering, to be sure, whether you agree--do you?); said it to the readers of Slate; but most of all, I've said it to myself. Michael Lewis' The New New Thing is the best book ever written about Silicon Valley. There. I've said it again.

Newsweek, Steven Levy, 25 October 1999
[Lewis] has a natural talent for spinning hilarious scenes and uncovering wicked details.

Business Week, Robert D. Hof, 8 November 1999
[Lewis's] incisive and entertaining volume largely succeeds in getting past the glitter of money to identify the real key to the Valley's vibrancy: new ideas....Lewis provides a look that is penetrating as anything written so far.

Publishers Weekly starred review, 27 September 1999
Lewis has created an absorbing and extremely literate profile of one of America's most successful entrepreneurs.... he provides a detailed look at the professional life of one of the men who have changed the world as we know it.

From Booklist , October 1, 1999
Lewis, in his eye-opening and best-selling Liar's Poker (1989), told tales on himself: about his meteoric rise from trainee at Salomon Brothers investment firm to very successful trader. Now he tells tales on someone else: Jim Clark, who created Netscape and thus "triggered the Internet boom." To write this profile, Lewis more or less shadowed Clark for a while, and dogging him meant participating in Clark's transatlantic journey in his obsessively designed, totally computerized sailing ship, Hyperion. Lewis' book, in effect, provides a look at the whole computer industry, for the more we learn about Clark, the more we learn about the industry as a whole. Silicon Valley, referred to as "the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet," is the Wall Street of the 1990s, and Clark is a primary mover and shaker. He is strictly an idea man, coming up with new ideas of how to make millions and leaving his engineers to arrive at workable details. Clark, as we follow and marvel at his career, invents his life as he goes along. What drives him is his abiding need to pursue new concepts and experiences. He is protypical of the superwealthy leadership in Silicon Valley: "the geek holed up in his basement all weekend discovering new things to do with his computer." That's the point of the Silicon Valley computer industry: people don't have to build new computers to make a fortune, they just have to devise new things for the computer to do. This book will prove very popular, not only with readers interested in business and computers but also with those who are simply curious about "the new new thing."
-- Brad Hooper
Copyright© 1999, American Library Association. All rights reserved

Kirkus Reviews
A rip-roaring profile of the high-rolling technology entrepreneur Jim Clark, and the strange Silicon Valley subculture in which he thrives, from one of our best business journalists. Michael Lewis, the petulant sprite whose Liar's Poker (1989) hilariously exposed the venalities of Wall Street investment bankers, vies for Tom Wolfe's ice cream suit with an effortlessly glib account of how the last decade turned Jim Clark, a middle-aged, chronically depressed Texas-born physicist whose futuristic concepts earned him little more than ridicule, into a Promethean, globe-trotting billionaire vainly searching for the next new thing that might make him happy. ...Funny, feverishly romantic business reporting in which the American lust for wealth becomes a Byronic quest for the next dream that will change the world.

San Jose Mercury News, Jeffrey Klein, 10 October 1999
The New New Thing is bound to become the big big book of the fall season, and deservedly so.

Forbes, Rich Karlgaard, 18 October 1999
[A] great book....The New New Thing is the best Silicon Valley book to come out yet.

Salon, Mark Gimein, 22 October 1999
Like all Lewis' writing, The New New Thing is funny. It is funny in a wry, carefully observed way -- "Gibagibagibagiba," babbles a baby unfortunately brought to a gathering of investment bankers. It is funny also in a slashing, profane way: "Clark's friends who did not know Ed McCracken," writes Lewis of Clark's early nemesis, "came to believe the man's name was Fucking Ed McCracken." Yet what makes The New New Thing an exceptional book is not how funny it is, but how closely it sticks to a mission of investigating the mythic properties of Clark's singularly mercurial character.