Nobody needs to do one-handed handstand pushups. If you’re strong enough to push yourself off the ground on one hand while in a candlestick position, then you can do so many other more productive, more conventional exercises. But sometimes, you want to give yourself a challenge to show off.
Sometimes, you gotta pop out, as Kendrick Lamar put it.
Who Is Government? is the writerly equivalent of that. Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, The Big Short, Liar’s Poker, and other business story bestsellers, presumably has a bunch of great stories and cool concepts floating around, which he could sell for large-digit book deals. Instead, he wrote what, on its face, should be a painfully unreadable book. It’s an essay collection — a medium that died with Christopher Hitchens — about state employees and bureaucrats, whom much of the public would be happy to see fired. Even as a fan of Lewis’s writing, I was dubious this would be worth reading. But, shortly into the first story — a 13,000-word profile of Christopher Mark at the Department of Labor — you remember why Vanity Fair used to pay him $10 a word.
Lewis found Mark’s name while searching through an impersonal list of nominees for a virtually unknown public service award called the “Sammies.” Every nominee listed the person’s name, position, and achievement without details. But beside Mark, who was credited with “the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines,” there were four tantalizing words of biography: “A former coal miner.” Lewis was pumped:
“Those words raised questions. Not about the work but about the man. They caused a picture to pop into my head. Of a person. Who must have grown up in a coal mining family. In West Virginia, I assumed, because, really, where else? Christopher Mark, I decided, just had to have some deeply personal stake in the problem he solved. His father, or maybe his brother, had been killed by a falling coal mine roof. Grief had spurred him to action, to spare others the same grief. A voice was crying to be heard.”
But then he called Mark:
“I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey,” he said. “My dad was a professor at the university.”
Lewis writes about Mark’s father, an academic who discovered why cathedral ceilings don’t collapse, and how young Mark rebels against him and eschews academics for the mines, where he hopes to inspire the working man with 1960s leftism. But then, Mark becomes obsessed with how to stop mine ceilings from falling in, studies it at university, and goes to the federal government to pursue it further.
Decades later, because of Mark’s frameworks, 2016 was the first year in which no American miners died from mine roof falls. The poetry of it all is that, as Lewis puts it to Mark, “You run away from home and your father’s bourgeois life, and you wind up doing underground what he did for Gothic cathedrals.” Mark “sharply” denies this, though his father called upon his son’s expertise in 2002 as they worked together to figure out if the Washington National Cathedral was stable.
And that’s just the first story. With Who Is Government?, Lewis does repeated sets of writerly handstand pushups, as this is one of the most eminently readable books I’ve read in a long time. It’s about bureaucrats, but you consume their stories with the pleasure of a great beach read.
Part of this is because the book is an essay collection. Lewis assembled an amazing team of writers to tell these stories — Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks, Casey Cep, John Lanchester, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell. But it’s also because, as Lewis notes in his introduction, most journalists don’t pay attention to these people, so there’s just a ton of good material waiting to be used.
This would have worked as a pure Lewis book rather than an essay collection, but that book somewhat already exists in his underread 2018 book, The Fifth Risk, which is about what the federal government actually does and the risks posed by the first Trump administration. Who Is Government?, as the title suggests, is focused narrowly on the people — a select set of remarkable public servants whose incredible work otherwise never gets the light.
Lewis sets the bar high, but his writers generally reach it. Cep’s chapter on Ronald E. Walters, head of the National Cemetery Administration, is exceptional writing about a touching, underappreciated part of the government. She flexes her talents, too, opening with the line, “There was no room for a parachute and nowhere to hide from the Devil.”
In his chapter “The Searchers,” Eggers writes about the most likable government division, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, showing a side and feel of NASA that I haven’t read before. It focuses on the kind of people that work there and their particular institutionally modest manner. Brooks, however, decided to work in hard mode, writing about the IRS. And yet, the man she focuses on, Jarod Koopman, is fantastic. As she writes:
“In my trade, it would be considered malpractice to make up Jarod Koopman. You just do not give your protagonist a set of attributes that includes black belts, vintage trucks, sommelier certificates, tattooed biceps, a wholesome, all-American rural family and a deeply consequential yet uncelebrated and under- remunerated career in global cybercrime. But as Mark Twain said: “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”
The one deviation from style is Lanchester’s essay on the consumer price index. It’s by far the worst chapter. Learning how the CPI works is interesting, but it would have been more compelling if it were wrapped around a character rather than dumped on the reader. Lanchester is also unnecessarily defensive of the CPI, and the book’s arguments are most persuasive when they’re implicit.
My biggest critique of Who Is Government? is that it’s uniformly one-sided. These portraits serve as an effective counternarrative to the DOGEian view of bureaucratic bloat and incompetence, but the book doesn’t address why most Americans want to minimize their interactions with the federal government. A better book would have highlighted good people who tried to reform fundamentally broken, inefficient parts of the government — ergo, the Department of Veterans Affairs’s incompetence in wartime veteran healthcare or the public communications failures of COVID-19 — but there’s no rot in Who Is Government? It’s also worth noting that, while Lewis is a great writer, he can get uncomfortably close to his subjects. This backfired (at least in the public perception) with The Blind Side and Going Infinite, which is about the now-imprisoned crypto tycoon Sam Bankman Fried.
Fundamentally, though, this won’t matter. DOGE fans aren’t going to buy this book. Lewis’s publicity approach has been to oppose Musk’s talking points, which will sell copies. If he succeeds, this could be the first #Resistance bestseller of the second Trump administration. And perhaps it should have been pitched differently, as our moment of heroes and villains, ingroups and outgroups, and overall tribal polarization could stand some well-told human stories that serve as evidence that it’s all a bit more complicated than any of that.
Ross Anderson is the life editor at the Spectator World and a tech and culture commentator for the New York Sun.
