It’s safe to say Obama knows a thing or two about how thankless government work can be, so it’s not hard to imagine why he might have been drawn to this literary love letter to the underappreciated civil servants who keep this country running.
To create this book, Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short and The Blindside, reached out to some of the most acclaimed writers with an assignment: find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write an essay about them. Dave Eggers, Kamau Bell, Geraldine Brooks, and others took the challenge and ran with it, writing compulsively readable and infectiously patriotic profiles of everyone from the manager who turned the National Cemetery Administration into the single best-run organization in the country to the mine inspector at the Department of Labor who is saving thousands of lives through innovative infrastructure.
While the roles may not sound glamorous, in these expert writers’ hands, and on the pedestal they deserve, each of them dazzles.