Berkeley author Michael Lewis named his most recent book about the 2008 economic meltdown The Big Short.
He could have called it The Upside (in a nod to a previous book, The Blind Side.)
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine sold a phenomenal 60,000 copies the week after it was released on March 21. By early April, fans had bought 162,000 copies of the book, Jason Boog writes on the publishing website Galley Cat. (And these figures are from Nielsen BookScan, which means even more copies were sold.)
Compare those numbers to the season’s other big economic-collapse book, Too Big to Fail, by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. It sold 14,000 in its first week (still a fabulous showing) and had sold 37,000 copies in the first month.
Moral of the story: Berkeley boy bests New York boy.