This is Michael Lewis season. You could hardly turn on the TV for last two weeks without seeing him talking about his new book, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.”

Sandra Bullock just won an Oscar for her role in “The Blind Side,” a movie based on a Michael Lewis book. His first book, “Liar’s Poker,” is required reading in many college business schools.

The common thread in Lewis’ work is value, and the differences between perceived value and real value. “Liar’s Poker” was about the beginning of the mortgage and junk bond markets in the 1980s. “The New New Thing” (1999) was about venture capitalists.

In “The Big Short,” Lewis brings quest for value into the ultimate minefield: Explaining how the American economy was collapsed by Wall Street’s failure to distinguish wealth from value.

So when Lewis quotes Steve Eisman, an analyst who is one of the oddball heroes of his book, as saying, “This was the engine of doom,” you begin to understand just how badly 300 million Americans got hosed by a relative handful of bond traders on Wall Street.

Most of them didn’t realize they were building an engine of doom. For them it was an engine of profits. Eisman and his colleagues, and a few other really smart people, had been “shorting,” that is, betting against subprime-backed mortgage loans, by buying credit default swaps – insurance that they’d be paid off if the bonds defaulted.

But when Eisman learned that Wall Street banks had begun to “synthesize” more bonds, backed not by mortgages but with credit default swaps on those mortgages, he had a revelation:

“They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford. They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses in the financial system are so much greater than just the subprime loans. That’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

Lewis tells his story through the eyes of a few of the people who saw through the smoke and wound up making a fortune. To call them “heroes” isn’t quite right; they were, after all, betting against the American financial system.

There was Eisman, a hedge-fund manager who’d seen through the first subprime mortgage scam, created by fly-by-night finance companies, in the mid-1990s. “I did subprime first,” he told Lewis. “I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn’t give a (darn) what it sold.”

There was Michael Burry, a neurologist who left the practice of medicine to form Scion Capital, an investment fund.

There were three guys in Berkeley, Calif.: Jamie Mai, Charlie Edley and Ben Hockett. Mai and Edley opened a private equity firm in a shed in a friend’s backyard, and hit a big bet on Capital One Financial Corp. options in the early 2000s. Hockett came on as a partner, and they talked themselves into a license to trade in subprime mortgage bonds.

By early 2007, the firms run by Eisman, Burry and the California guys all held huge short positions on subprime mortgage bonds. To Eisman, Lewis writes, “the market seemed mainly stupid or delusional.” To Burry, the subprime market “looked increasingly like a fraud.” To Charlie Ledley, it seemed that the U.S. financial system “had been systematically corrupted.”

All of them were right. All of them got rich. For that matter, so did the people who helped create the problems. The rest of America continues to pay.

For a book about value, “The Big Short” leaves you wondering about values.