Michael Lewis, _The Fifth Risk_

IT SEEMED ALTOGETHER fitting to read this right after Ben Fountain's book on the election that landed Trump in the White House, and doing so allowed me to spot an interesting coincidence. Hunter S. Thompson seemed to hover as tutelary spirit over Beautiful Country Burn Again, and The Fifth Risk is dedicated to the recently deceased Tom Wolfe.

It was a novel thing for me to hold Thompson and Wolfe in a single thought, but maybe it should not have been; I bet everyone of my generation who read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the two writers were often cited together as leading lights of the New Journalism back when that was a thing.

They must have crossed paths, perhaps often. What happened when they did? (Puts me in mind of that story of the one time Joyce met Proust.) Thompson in leather jacket and aviator shades, Wolfe in a white bespoke suit with cufflinks and...spats, possibly. What would they have talked about? Maybe the Hell's Angels?

Everything I've  read by Lewis has been excellent, and this is no exception. In contrast to Wolfe (and to Thompson, for that matter), he is utterly self-effacing. He must be an amazing interviewer--whoever he talks to, the reader feels that person is right there in the room with you, explaining with perfect lucidity some phenomenon you did not previously even know existed, but now seems fascinating.

The gist of the book is that many, perhaps most, of Trump's appointees found themselves running departments whose work they did previously know even existed. They tended to come in with the idea that most federal operations were cumbersome, intrusive, overfunded trespasses upon the swift efficiencies of the free market. Turns out the National Weather Service, the USDA, DARPA, et al., do all sorts of invaluable work that the free market would not go near because the work is difficult to render profitable. The exact nature of that work--its complexity, the unusual expertise it requires, the commitment  to public service it demands of those who do it--is what we learn about from Lewis's interview subjects.

The title? The "fifth risk" is "the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions." Short-term solutions are what you are likely to get when those in the government making decisions are ideologically committed to dismantling government. I only hope the federal government's work is not plummeting to hell in a handbasket quite so rapidly as this book suggests it is likely to be.