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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 achie...
Why Covid-19 is always one step ahead of the US responsehttps://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid...==========The author of a book on the psychology of pandemics explains how lockdowns and other such methods can backfirehttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...=================This book is not going to be ranked with the author’s best books, such as Moneyball and The Big Short, but it was interesting nevertheless.There’s a certain irony that Trump trolls and Libertarians have attacked this book, when...
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?"Lewis...
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.
- "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."- "We are the bad example for the rest of the world."True, this book was not as informative as The...
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...
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 tha...
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 w...
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. We'd learned a lot. We had better techn...
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 St...
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 differen...
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.
