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The Premonition: A Pandemic Story Hardcover – 4 May 2021

by Michael Lewis (Author)

4.4 17,275 ratings

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THE SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'Superb ... It is tremendous fun, tremendously told' Tom Whipple, 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

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Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Allen Lane
Publication date

4 May 2021
Dimensions

16.2 x 3.1 x 24 cm
ISBN-10

0241512476
ISBN-13

978-0241512470
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Popular highlights in this book

What are Popular highlights?

“Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence,”
Highlighted by 4,517 Kindle readers
The root of the CDC’s behavior was simple: fear. They didn’t want to take any action for which they might later be blamed.
Highlighted by 2,707 Kindle readers
I think this particular story is about the curious talents of a society, and how those talents are wasted if not led.
Highlighted by 1,467 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Product description

Review

When the stories of our times are told, there will be no more seminal documents than the books of Michael Lewis. ― Guardian

He is so good everyone else may as well pack up. ― Evening Standard

Michael Lewis is one of the premier chroniclers of our age. ― Huffington Post

Superb ... It is tremendous fun, tremendously told. There is a lot to take from it - about the inertia of the US civil service, about the "malignant obedience" of middle managers, about how people fearful of the pandemic were treated with the "wary indulgence of the sane in the presence of the fanatic" ... Among those truths, in a familiar lesson for much of the world this year, is the danger of hubris. -- Tom Whipple ― The Times

A gripping story ... This is a book about some brave, curious people who tried hard to swim against the tide. As always in a Lewis book they are brought vividly alive ... Lewis is a master of his form. -- Christina Patterson ― The Sunday Times

A fluid intellectual thriller ... As always with Lewis, the book is full of fascinating facts and personal angles. -- Steven Poole ― Daily Telegraph Books of the Year 2021

[Reading The Premonition] we see a disturbing common trait emerging in our country and others: the unwillingness to prioritise people's lives over ideas and ingrained structures. -- Kazuo Ishiguro ― Observer Books of the Year 2021

It is hard to think of a writer who has had more success than Michael Lewis at turning forbiddingly complex situations into propulsive nonfiction narratives ... Without his ever having to spell it out, Lewis's message comes across very powerfully: the US government, in its institutional dysfunction, is in danger of abandoning its citizens to a private sector that is even less equipped to deal with large-scale disasters such as Covid. -- Mark O’Connell ― The Guardian

From the Back Cover

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allen Lane; 1st edition (4 May 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0241512476
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241512470
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.2 x 3.1 x 24 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 197,679 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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4.4 17,275 ratings

About the author

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Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

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4.4 out of 5

17,275 global ratings

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Hande Z

Cry panic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 June 2021

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COVID-19 corona virus has spawned innumerable stories all across the world. Michael Thomas tells a riveting one about seven doctors known as ‘The Wolverines’, led by Carter Mecher, an internist at a Veterans Affairs Medical Centre in Chicago. The 21st century coronavirus pandemic brought these seven together as it brought them to Charity Dean, another doctor, who had taken a low paying job as the head of the Health Authority in Santa Barbera.

Lewis is a talented and experienced writer who knows how to inject excitement into all the stories he has written. COVID-19 is not just a pandemic, it has proven to be on scale, worse than the Spanish Flu of 1918. Lewis uses his characters to track how the virus surfaced in China and how it spread to the USA, unnoticed by some and ignored by others.

But this band of Wolverines was recruited like the Magnificent Seven under Chris Adams (the 1960 John Sturges movie). Chris Adams had it easy, he only had to deal with a band of Mexican bandits. Carter and the Wolverines had to figure out how to stop a deadly virus from spreading across the country, and at the same time, they had to fight his own administrators (this was in the time of President Trump).

Like all wars, the stories of resistance have the greatest heroics. In this story, Charity Dean was brought in touch with the Wolverines by Duane Caneva who Charity initially thought was a Trump storm trooper, but she soon realised that he was part of the resistance. Together, they had to understand the enemy, how it fanned out, and how to find it. In the course of this, they realised that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (‘CDC’) was not up to the task.

This story of COVID-19 hunters and the weapons and tactics they employ will one day tie in with other stories of the Pandemic of 2020, and one can only hope that it will be The Pandemic Story – With a Happy Ending.

11 people found this helpful

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Tom_Mc

People can do so much, but

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 March 2023

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The book was great at highlighting some truly wonderful people, which was very uplifting, however when the stuff hit the fan they could achieve next to nothing. Being in the UK at the moment and listening to people even now arguing that the lockdown was a waste of time, I’m not surprised how difficult it was in the US.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 August 2021

Verified Purchase

The US once led from the front, taking special care to put its citizens first.

The rest of the world transmits electricity into your home appliances at 220 Volts. The US suffers a tiny bit financially, but delivers it at 110 Volts, which saves lives. The rest of the world chlorinates water. The US does one better, it fluorinates. The rest of the world was happy to suffer lead in its gasoline (and lungs) well into the eighties. The US switched to unleaded as early as 1972. And toward the end of “The Premonition” you learn that as recently as 1976 the US embarked on a mass vaccination program to stop a potential repeat of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

What you also learn from this book is that there’s nothing left of the lead the US once enjoyed or the ability of its government to improve people’s lives.

This is the story of the team that, in response to an order from George W Bush, put together the nation’s plan to fight pandemics, only to see Bolton shut it down halfway through the Trump administration, just in time for the US to totally fumble the recent Coronavirus pandemic.

In the way that only Michael Lewis can, you are introduced to Bob Glass, Charity Dean, Carter Melcher, Richard Hatchett and Joe DeRisi and follow them as they take it upon themselves to rescue America in this most recent challenge.

If you read the papers, you know they failed. Here you get to see why: the institutions that would once have taken charge are shown to now be ossified facsimiles of their former selves, mainly focused on avoiding blame, preserving the status quo and suppressing the efforts of any potential usurper.

Just as depressingly, from my angle, the only institutions that come out well from this are the ones funded privately by billionaires and millionaires.

I finished this today, August 21st, with the recent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in the news and I can’t say I’m surprised.

16 people found this helpful

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Michael Davison

Government, and why they cannot function in a crisis

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 August 2021

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Michael Lewis has written the most interesting book showing how individuals who wish to do a public good with no interest in either politics or profits can be destroyed by the immovable monolith called Government and the buck passing, back watching people who make it fail. Whilst the pandemic may not have been stoppable, had the interventions described by the pandemic plan been implemented not only in the USA but the World, the death rate and misery would have been seriously reduced, for this the CDC, WHO and not only the US Government but all World Governments who took their lead from the CDC and WHO should hang their heads in shame. It would be unfair to single out Trump, but as the “Leader” of the Free World, had he shown one iota of intelligence, knowing and having access to the reports, he should have reacted more aggressively to get on top of the pandemic, but like Boris Johnson in the U.K., he dithered, he stalled, he played down the pandemic as nothing more than influenza on steroids - the World can only surmise the source of the virus, it certainly looks to have been created via Gain of Function research, but what the World is certain of - the failure to plan and take action has led to a death toll that is still rising, and not only because of C-19 but because medical services treating existing or new medical conditions have been diverted to treat C-19 patients causing a treatment backlog. Thank you Michael Lewis and all the brilliant people mentioned who tried and continue to try to get the message across - this book has been a revelation.

4 people found this helpful

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AOR_Jim

Good description of some key individuals preparing and then dealing with the US covid outbreak

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 October 2022

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Good read, obviously focused on the American preparations and response to the Pandemic.
It didn't really come to a conclusion, just sort of stopped.

Not as good as the big short

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 February 2023

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Arrived in time to give as a present

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tom

A true story that will bring tears to your eyes and the hopeful realization that God is really on our side and will keep us safe!

Reviewed in the United States on 11 April 2022

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This is a real historical record of what happened with this Coronavirus and why Lewis thought it happened the way it did up to 2021.
After doing some basic research I determined I purchased this book Aug 2021 after watching a “60 Minutes” program that featured Michael Lewis, the author of this book. He at the time mentioned Charity Dean and I think Richard Hatchett and Carter Meachem and others (nicknamed the Wolverines after the “Red Dawn” movie) who are all major players trying to stop this major disaster in real life.
I then read roughly half of it and then let it sit for at least 6 months by just working around it and actually ignoring it and the same time acknowledging I really needed to read the rest of the story. It was depressing to me to read.
Finally I determined that I needed to finish reading the book and have done so.
And but for the grace of God we have survived so far this Coronavirus, but not because these players did NOT do everything they could do to assist us the people to survive but because 99% of the main players that could control the Coronavirus did absolutely nothing and in actual fact hindered their assistance and help to control this virus.
Lewis ends the book by declaring that Charity Dean is starting a real commercial company to make a profit and maybe if at all possible at the same time save the world. Charity has finally determined that the only way to get the attention she needed was to make it cost. And the more it costs the more attention and credibility she will get to help control the next Pandemic. And there will be another, probably sooner rather than 100 years from now like the “Spanish Flu”. And it could very well be this same Coronavirus, just mutated.
She is doing this because if she doesn’t no one else will. Which possibly means that the human world will end up as the best case in a new “middle ages” or at the worst extinct. The ones in the middle are to scary to even imagine. Hopefully with her help and others like the Wolverines we can survive.
I realize that this is probably not a fair review.
But other readers must determine what they think of the book and review what they think of it. I really don’t think I’m to far off my opinion of this book.
This whole mess is scary!

And just so you know Michael Lewis also wrote among many others “The Blind Side & Moneyball”.
This author is amazing!

14 people found this helpful

Big Mama

Just the best, as always with this most talented author... I learned more about the pandemic and the dreadful response of the U.S. government

Reviewed in Germany on 27 July 2022

Verified Purchase

t in this book than in the dozen other books I have read about this terrifying contagion spreading still and what must be done about it.

Loren

Full of insights, and surprisingly easy to read

Reviewed in France on 10 June 2021

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Although this a book about the Covid pandemic, it reads like a well-written novel. Definitely. Worth reading.Lots of insights, from medicine to computer science to politics.

ANIL KUMAR NAYAK

The Backstory

Reviewed in India on 1 June 2021

Verified Purchase

Story of the unsung hero’s who work tirelessly to run the badly designed public health system. Beautifully described by the author.

Shantaram

今マイケルがマイブームである

Reviewed in Japan on 1 October 2023

Verified Purchase

１０．３に最新刊が発売されるのが楽しみです。その前にこちらを読み終えよう！

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The Premonition: A Pandemic Story Hardcover – 4 May 2021

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