The Premonition
A Pandemic Story
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4.3 • 48 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
THE SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'Superb ... It is tremendous fun, tremendously told' The Times
'A fluid intellectual thriller' Daily Telegraph
From the global bestselling author of The Big Short, the gripping story of the maverick scientists who hunted down Covid-19
'It's a foreboding,' she said. 'A knowing that something is looming around the corner. Like how when the seasons change you can smell Fall in the air right before the leaves change and the wind turns cold.'
In January 2020, as people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan, China, few really understood the magnitude of what was happening. Except, that is, a small group of scientific misfits who in their different ways had been obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated - and with why the governments and the institutions that were supposed to look after us, kept making the same mistakes time and again.
This group saw what nobody else did. A pandemic was coming. We weren't prepared.
The Premonition is the extraordinary story of a group who anticipated, traced and hunted the coronavirus; who understood the need to think differently, to learn from history, to question everything; and to do all of this fast, in order to act, to save lives, communities, society itself. It's a story about the workings of the human mind; about the failures and triumphs of human judgement and imagination. It's the story of how we got to now.
'Lewis is a master of his form' Sunday Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maverick doctors, scientists, and public health officials took charge of the fight against Covid-19 when the CDC and the Trump administration failed to act, according to this illuminating rehash of recent history. Lewis (The Fifth Risk) spotlights a group of doctors who overcame bureaucratic inertia and conventional wisdom to write the U.S.'s pandemic response plan in 2007, after President George W. Bush read a history of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and asked what the government would do in such a scenario. Carefully reinterpreting data from 1918, Veterans Affairs official Carter Mecher and other group members developed a "Swiss Cheese strategy" of multiple social interventions (school closures, bans on group gatherings, etc.) layered on top of one another to contain a disease outbreak until a vaccine could be developed. In January 2020, Mecher used sketchy, incomplete data emerging from China to forecast the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S., and shared his findings with California deputy chief health officer Charity Dean, who eventually convinced Gov. Gavin Newsom to issue the country's first statewide stay-at-home order. Though the book's first half is somewhat slow-going, Lewis draws vivid profiles of Mecher and Dean, in particular, and litters the narrative with lucid explanations of epidemiology, disease modeling, and genomic sequencing. Readers will be aghast that these experts weren't leading the battle from the start.
Customer Reviews
The Premonition
A must read. The truth about how the US government and the CDC failed the American public.
Michael Lewis does pandemic
4.5 stars
Author
American. Financial journalist and non-fiction writer. Educated at Princeton and the London School of Economics then worked on Wall Street in the 1980s. The experience led to his first book Liar’s Poker (1989). He’s written 18 more since then, several of which have been successfully adapted or the screen, e.g. Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, where he is contributing editor. Mr Lewis’s modus operandi is to look at a major event, such as the 2008 financial crisis, through the eyes of contrarian thinkers who succeeded where most failed by defying the conventional wisdom. It’s a niche area of which he is undoubtedly king. His best work involves finance, hardly surprising given his background, but his writing style is biographical and intensely personal, and about as far from dry financial journalism as you are likely to find. That having been said, it would have well nigh impossible for him to write about anything other than the pandemic in 2020.
Summary
Even with the lockdowns, Mr Lewis managed to round up a group of colourful characters across the US, all with firm, and in most cases eminently sensible, ideas about managing pandemics. All are miffed to varying degrees that no one in authority is taking notice of them, but refuse to be daunted by that. Actresses are doubtless lining up already to play the feisty, fortyish, female California public health doc on the big screen. I suspect some might be willing to donate a kidney if that’s what it took to secure the role of Charity Dean, who is Bette Davis with a stethoscope. Surprisingly, Donald Trump is not the villain here, not the major one anyway. Lewis portrays him as largely peripheral, a dupe of the bloated self-obsessed bureaucracy. California governor Gavin Newsom cops a bigger serve, but Mr L heaps his greatest vitriol on the CDC. How richly they deserved that, I cannot say. Lewis’s account is far from balanced, nor does it pretend to be.
Writing
Up to the author’s usual high standard: a pleasure to read
Bottom line
While far Mr Lewis’s best work, this is an entertaining and informative yarn well worth price. If you want a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the pandemic, come back in a few years.