The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
Michael Lewis
For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. more
304 pages, Hardcover
First published W. W. Norton & Company
4.34
Rating
39142
Ratings
4041
Reviews
Michael Lewis
48 books 13333 followers
Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, The Money Culture, The New New Thing, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Panic, Home Game, The Big Short, and Boomerang, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.Community reviews
Damn straight. “There is no incentive to prevent things,” Lewis says. “If you look at what our two societies have in common, we’ve given ourselves over to markets in a way that’s pretty extreme. Which is to say, we strongly encourage things that pay and we give correspondingly less attention to things that don’t pay. Prevention does not pay. more
Michael Lewis held my attention in this riveting account about how the US met the threat of Covid19, a virus that made 2020 the most challenging year that many of us had ever faced. This book gave me an inside look into ways in which our healthcare system failed in the most difficult crisis they had faced since the 1918 flu epidemic. However, Lewis also documents many valiant men and women who faced the crisis head-on, with courage and intelligence. Unfortunately, many of them met with bureaucratic roadblocks that stymied their progress. It was worth reading the book just to gain a more complete understanding of the role of the CDC during the pandemic. more
Click here to hear my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive. There are going to be a lot of pandemic books coming out in the coming months, but this is one that tells a story that was not exactly mainstream in 2020. In this book, Michael Lewis (in his typical fashion) talks about a small group of people who worked in or around public health and who had ideas about how to respond to the growing COVID threat, but really struggled to be heard. Like Lewis always seems to achieve, he takes a story we've all just lived through and turns it into a page-turning thriller. . more
This has been on my bookshelf for a couple of months, and I picked it up this week because I wanted a reliable read. Something I could be pretty sure I would find worth my time. And wow, was it ever. I've been a Michael Lewis fan going all the back to his first book, Liar's Poker, and this is one of his best. The topic is timely (sadly, we are still still in a pandemic) and a question lingering in the air is, "How could our response to this crisis have fallen so miserably short of the mark. more
I absolutely looked forward to reading this book after reading Lewis' The Fifth Risk. It was spooky to read in that book, published in 2018, that "The basic role of government is to keep us safe" and one of the potential disasters on the list is "an airborne virus wiping out millions of people" (page 25). UPDATENot quite what I expected but still deeply informative. There was more background of handling a pandemic than I expected and less blame given to Trump. more
Read this Book. Most of us have many questions about the ongoing Covid pandemic. This book provides the context for most of those questions and raises a few questions of its own; particularly about the Centers for Disease Control and how they saw their roles and responsibilities. Just as Americans were being repatriated from Wuhan, the government decided to only test those who were running a fever, even though other countries including Japan had already proved that a certain percentage of those infected did not manifest any fever: "Did they want to avoid finding cases to avoid displeasing Donald Trump. Were they concerned that, if they tested people without symptoms and they found the virus, they’d make a mockery of their current requirement that only people with symptoms be tested. more
I was a bit disappointed by this book, as a big fan of the author. It feels like it was maybe rushed to print. The writing is, unsurprisingly, quite good. But it feels like there is no unique, core purpose or thesis for the book, unlike his prior work. It gets better in the second half, when he starts writing more about the coronavirus, but he doesn’t really bring the themes from the first half of the book into the second half, so it feels like two separate pieces rather than part of a narrative whole. more
Lewis has written an historical account of pandemic planning in the United States through the administrations of Bush, Obama and Trump. It ends up being a scathing indictment of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The author highlights the shortcomings of the United States’ health system when facing a pandemic. By not having a centralized national health care system, the U. S. more
- "Despite the White House spin attempts, this will go down as a colossal failure of the public health system of this country. The biggest challenge in a century and we let the country down. The public health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic. "- "We know what the virus will do," she liked to say. "We don't know what the humans will do. more
I started The Premonition but couldn't get past the second chapter. It began like an error-filled screed filled with unlikeable (waaa. no one is listening to me. ) protagonists Why go further. There are MANY reasons to criticize the US response to COVID but, starting in the first chapter, Mr. more
This is a book about scientists and public health officials who rely on trained intuition. In a system ill-equipped to act nimbly in a pandemic landscape, they are the people that speak to what needs to be done now, not in a month or more when there are more cases and deaths. These characters are the system disrupters of public health in America. You may not agree with all of their conclusions and actions, but this is the best book Lewis has written in years. A fantastic narrative nonfiction that I highly recommend. more
Fascinating insider story of how COVID-19 was mishandled by the US government, the CDC, and the WHO. Michael Lewis's tactic that has worked in his past books (Moneyball, The Big Short) worked great with Dr Charity Dean and others - he went deep into the character of this health worker from Santa Barbara, and through her told the story of ineptitude. My only criticism is I think he could have focused more on the global picture, as it was not just every state in the US fighting this thing differently, it was (and is) every country in the world. Maybe that would be good for a sequel. Hilarious by the way that Charity Dean started in Santa Barbara, and the book describes her visiting the old age home where my grandmother lives. more
Just Wow. I think this is the most amazingly honest and frightening non fiction book I've ever read. Filled with amazing people doing so much research and work about pandemics years before Covid 19. The first thing I did after reading the first 30 pages was to look up who my county health commissioner is. I'm going to research that more. more
Michael Lewis has a real gift for rendering complex problems and systems into manageable bits and pieces for the lay reader looking in from the outside. This was demonstrated amply by Lewis's latest book, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2021). Lewis weaves a story of epidemics and pandemics and the people who fight them. COVID-19 is the latest chapter in a very long history of the ongoing battle between humanity and disease, and disease's agents, the most notorious of them being viruses. It was both intriguing and disturbing to get an inside look at what went wrong in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic response--which seemed like everything. more
4. 5 for an informative and fascinating book. When Covid-19 hit, and the world began its slow descent into isolation, death, and economic shutdown, I remember thinking how unprecedented this all was, and how unsettling if not downright frightening. I remember thinking that those smarter than me, and with all the power, were going to ride in on their white horses and tell us exactly how they were going to slay this beast. After all, we'd had pandemics before. more
“The federal government wasn’t just this faceless gray mass of two million people. Nor was it some well-coordinated deep state seeking to subvert the will of the people. It was a collection of experts, among them some real heroes, whom we neglected and abused at our peril. Yet we’d been neglecting and abusing them for more than a generation. That behavior climaxed with the Trump administration. more
This book describes the bumbling way the US confronted the Covid 19 crisis. Of course we Americans know about the political (non) leadership at the time. Trump told the states they were on their own and forced them to compete with each other for medical supplies. What was most alarming was that he had scientists backing him up. The author, Michael Lewis, introduces us to the real, heroic American scientists who actually made a difference. more
3. 5 I am quite the fan of Michael Lewis, quoting from my review of his book The Fifth Risk I wrote: Lewis has a talent for seeking out the unsung heroes in any situation and in so doing navigating his readers around often complex topics - high-frequency trading, baseball statistics, macroeconomics and now the workings of the US federal government. The Premonition is a natural successor to The Fifth Risk , continuing its themes of the unwieldy nature of bureaucratic monoliths to deal nimbly with a crisis. In this case, the crisis is the Coronavirus pandemic and the Centers for Disease Control ( CDC ) is the black box monolith that fails to react. Now I will caveat this review with the fact I am not American and have no way to verify if Lewis's stance is particularly one-sided or not. more
A sobering story of how brilliant, passionate healthcare professionals wade into bureaucracy and neglect, while desperately trying to combat pandemicsYou cannot wait for the smoke to clear, once you can see things clearly it’s already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic, by the time you start to run it is already upon youThe CDC, and the US government in general, is rather starkly portrayed as incompetent and complacent in this book on the preparation against a pandemic. Disheartening how elected officials are incompetent to the point of negligence to adres existential risks for citizens, all due to political considerations. More thoughts to follow. more
Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knowsThat too many people have died. From Blowin’ In The Wind by Bob DylanThis book is the story of some people who more than ten years prior to 2020 worried about, anticipated, and tried to prepare for the next pandemic. That is in fact the very definition of “Premonition”. It describes their efforts and frustrations to create a plan that would limit the number of deaths in the case of another 1918 type influenza. It tells of the difficulties working with the government bureaucracy and the objections by health officials around the country. more
From what I can tell, Michael Lewis (author of The Big Short and Moneyball) has a formula. His work seems to focus on gritty, odd ball, visionary, outsider types who (a) read the system, and (b) go against the grain, at (c) great personal risk, and ultimately (d) get it right and in so doing, (e) win big. It’s a really cool ‘rugged ballsy individual’ play by play, view from the ground, meets the ‘smarter than you’ technocrat, complex systems level perspective. Wait a minute…. Writing this out makes me realize that I’m basically describing what amounts to middle aged managerial class competence porn. more
Michael Lewis is a genius of non-fiction writing but this is not his best stuff. He doesn't seem to understand epidemiology the way he does finance or sports, so this doesn't have the feel of his previous books where he's masterfully explaining some complex concept through interesting characters. The characters here seem as baffled by the incompetence of the US government as the rest of us. The unsatisfying conclusion flowing from this confusion seems to be that we should just declare red alerts frequently because there's no way to prevent pandemics or to figure out in time what is merely a false alarm. -Nerd addendum:The ending is based on Lewis's interpretation of the 1976 flu vaccine fiasco. more
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story is vintage Michael Lewis as he takes us through the years leading up to the pandemic and the people that had the forsight to see what was ahead. Michael Lewis builds upon his last book, The Fifth Risk, in which he highlighted the ignorance of the Trump administration and how unprepared they were to take over the governing of this nation resulting in a deliberate weakening of government agencies and offices designed to protect its citizens. Because, the United States of America had a plan to fight the pandemic with the first draft being written in 2005 as ordered by President George Bush after reading John Barry's The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. This office remained viable during the Obama administration, utilizing it for the outbreaks of ebola and the swine flu. However, this was one of the many government agencies to be weakened or dismantled under Trump. more
I was sure I would never want to read a book about this pandemic. But I was wrong. This is mostly about the nerds and outsiders who saw it coming and sounded the alarm, and how the system failed. Could have read 500 more pages of this. more
Fascinating. Explains a lot about the clusterf*** that is the US government’s response (both initial and ongoing) to the COVID pandemic. 4. 5. more
This book was a page-turner, but also about 200 pages shorter than it needed to be. This book has three characters: the science, the government organizations, and the heroes. Come for the heroes, stay for the science, and remember the government organizations. Lewis has found some excellent characters to tell the story of the science and the bureaucracy through, and it's fascinating to hear how the now-famous book about the 1918 flu inspired George W Bush to invest in pandemic preparedness. More than half of the book happens prior to 2018, and the remainder mostly focuses on January 1, 2020 to March 19, 2020 (when California became the first state to declare a lockdown). more
Michael Lewis has written a narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic, starting with an excoriation of President Trump's disastrous handling by downplaying the severity of the disease and muzzling anyone who broke ranks with his agenda. Lewis highlights the actions of a County public health official in California (Dr. Charity Deans), a hodge podge group of like-minded folks in Washington and a professor in California (who developed a reliable COVID test), who refused to be misled by the terrible advice and inaction by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. Strangely, Dr. Fauci is barely mentioned in the novel, and it got very repetitive towards the end. more
Truly amazing book by an author whose writing style is very accessible. I read Lewis's last book, The Fifth Risk, about a year and half ago. It was quite an eye opener especially if you believe that a basic tenet of government is to keep us safe. That book unveiled the extent to which deep expertise and experience in things that really matter had been undone, particularly by the Trump administration. The Premonition takes that book to the next level as it unveils just how badly the pandemic was bungled, with much criticism leveled at the CDC and failure of the imagination at the highest levels of government. more
**Note: An entire sentence was left off paragraph #2 in my original – I have now corrected it. **It appears that Pres. George W. Bush in 2005, in a panic after reading a book by John Barry “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History” had the foresight to take action should something like that ever happen again and an organization was formed. Bush was (rightly) trying to prepare for the future. more
This was such a frustrating read. Made me want to smack so many people. more