Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 59)

Michael Lewis: So now we’re going to explore exactly how I’m screwed up in the less obvious ways. Michael Sartisky: Peggy managed to present to you in three minutes what I was going to drag out over an hour and a quarter. We are here to interview and talk with Michael Lewis, who as far as I know is all those things Peggy said he was and wasn’t. I met Michael’s mother Diana at one of those innumerable non-profit gatherings that she haunts and told her I was going to be interviewing Michael and she said, “Well, be careful, he’s probably going to end up interviewing you.” Michael Lewis, who as Peggy said, and as I was going to say before Peggy said what Peggy said, is a Newman graduate, went on to be an art history major, of all things, at Princeton University, for reasons that he in fact can explain. Today we’re going to work our way through some of the canon of Michael Lewis and we’re going to talk a bit about the content of his books, why certain subjects attracted his attention, and why he chose to explore those. He literally burst upon the literary world with Liar’s Poker in 1989, followed by Pacific Rift in 1990; in 1992 a collection of other essays about the financial culture, The Money Culture; 1997 Trail Fever, 1999 The New New Thing, 2001 Next: The Future Just Happened, 2003 Moneyball, 2005 Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life, and 2006 The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. It’s a prolific and wonderful canon of work. Lewis: It helps when you publish everything three times. Sartisky: Michael: let me start with this, why did an art history major pursue a career in finance as you did with Salomon Brothers? Lewis: There weren’t any jobs in art history; there really weren’t. I can remember with horror when I was a senior at Princeton, realizing that everybody else had prepared for what was going to come next, except for me. Wall Street has a lot to do with this. In the Ivy League schools and the fancy colleges in this country that don’t have pre-professional schools that Michael Lewis, 2006 Winter 2007-08/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 59

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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