Reddit reviews The Fifth Risk

Michael Lewis has the fabulous skill of taking an important issue and arranging it as an amazing story. A portion of his book The Fifth Risk, was separated out by Audible as part of its "audible originals" series, and can be listened to separately as The Coming Storm.

It bugged me that so much of The Fifth Risk was this excerpt since I'd listened to The Coming Storm first, so there's a packaging problem there to be aware of, but that excerpt is solid and important. For people who have audible subscriptions, I definitely recommend The Coming Storm, even though it robs enough of The Fifth Risk that I don't then recommend the other book.

Ignoring that, though, it tells the story (better than I will summarize here) of how the national weather service is publicly funded, but commercial forces have fought to keep it from being made easily and freely available to the public so they can build private services that both compete with the public service and rely on it. I'm not doing the stunning and frankly scary nature of it justice here. The article here is consistent with what's in that story, but no one tells it like Michael Lewis. Even knowing what you're expecting to find in that story, I'm betting you'll still be shocked.