If you are looking for Michael Lewis’ new book  THE UNDOING PROJECT to be another MONEYBALL, THE BIG SHORT or THE BLIND SIDE, you won’t find it.

THE UNDOING PROJECT, published this year, is a cerebral look that undoes common wisdom about how we form opinions and make up our minds.  The subtitle of the book, A Friendship That Changed  Our Minds,  uncovers the relationship between two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who together broke the mold into investigating the human decision-making process.

Most appropriately, Lewis sets the scene for this work of non-fiction by explaining how  the non conventional statistical analysis of the potential of baseball players as  detailed  in his book  MONEYBALL was later used by the Houston Rockets basketball team.  The narrative quickly transforms into an  examination of exactly how psychologists Tversky and Kahneman through extensive scientific research in academia  both in Israel and the United States discovered exactly how the mind works when forming judgements  about  people and their performance potential in specific situations.  The book  advances its own unique theory of a person’s ability to think objectively.

Interspersed with the science is the personal story of two unlikely collaborators who formed an extraordinary  friendship and dramatically advanced a greater understanding of how initial perceptions can overwhelm reality.  The ” Halo effect.”  How do we examine specific individual qualities separately from the whole? Deep but fascinating.