Author: Michael Lewis
I’m a big fan of Michael Lewis. He has a writing style that is the Goldilocks “Just Right” portion for me. He describes the essence of the technical details without getting too much into the nitty gritty complexity that can bog you down. Additionally he is a great writer who keeps you hooked by telling stories of interesting people.
This book was probably written as a way for him to cope with the outrageousness of the Trump transition to President of United States. He focuses on the many departments of federal government, whose role is not evident to most of the population. For example, the Department of Energy is responsible for preventing nuclear disasters and these can come in many different forms as Michael is only too eager to describe. Similarly the Department of Agriculture (USDA) includes food safety, nutrition programs, rural development, etc.
The final section delves into the huge data that is collected by the US government through all its different functions and how clueless US politicians are on their purpose. For example the Department of Commerce includes the National Weather Service (NWS) that is responsible collecting all the data that goes into predicting our daily weather. Apparently one of the congressmen asked why taxpayers need to fund the NWS as he could simply get his weather from Accuweather. But guess where Accuweather gets the data from which it makes the predictions on the weather? It is from the NWS. He also describes how Trump nominated Barry Meyers, the owner of Accuweather, to be appointed as the head of the NOAA (NWS is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). This would have turned out to be a major conflict of interest that was averted by Myers withdrawing his nomination.
