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.

A Pandemic Story

The Premonition

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.

Daniel Bower

Eitan Hershkovitz

If you want to know who saved your life during the pandemic. This book is a good place to start.

Tanya Sutton

Terrifying but a must-read for anyone affected by the public health system in America...which is all of us.

Christian Beck

Absolute must-read. Lewis does a fantastic job expanding the book beyond just 2020 and in the stories and years that preceded it over the past decades. This book shows that the U.S.’s disastrous response to COVID had many guilty parties, and were actually set in motion years before.

It’s also a fascinating tale of true American patriots and hero’s that overcame such a failed system and inept administration to save the U.S. from even more catastrophic losses. I’m left feeling partly dismayed at how ineffective our government is but also inspired by what bright and courageous people can do.

I highly recommend reading The Fifth Risk before tackling The Premonitiom they feel closely related. The first a disection of the Trump administrations lack of control over the aparatus of US government, the second as the sharp end of their incompetance in the face of a global panemdic. 

Equally, it is more than an opportunity berate Trump. It's also a story about at how science repeatedly comes second to politics, media optics, corportate interests, and the messy business of democracy. Most countries will have been able to recognise those patterns in themselves over the past 18 months.

As with all of Lewis' writing the characters are fantastic and their individual stories are as interesting as the main arch to the book. One gripe however is the tendency towards the exceptionalism of the Americans profiled. I have no doubt that they are all brilliant individuals, however too often the book claims they are doing world first, seminal or cutting edge research with little attention paid to effort of other nations. I appreciate that the sub-heading over this book is 'A Pandemic Story' not *the* pandemic story, and that the focus is quite clearly on American. But some recogition of the well documented work of other nations, particularly east Asian ones, would have been well received.



The Premonition A Pandemic Story

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