The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

You open a Michael Lewis book knowing it will be full of Michael Lewis characters—brainy, contrarian visionaries—and here they include a California public health official, a Zuckerberg-funded biochemist, and a self-styled "redneck epidemiologist," all of whom, in some sense, saw COVID coming and, more contentiously, saw what would be required to stop it. And while the public mishandling of the COVID crisis is part of Lewis's tale, his real story—told, as always, with cinematic skill and almost impossibly larger-than-life characters—takes place behind the scenes, as decades of effort and then months of urgent warnings fail to move elected officials and a reluctant bureaucracy to action. The Premonition is too anecdotal to stand as the last word on the COVID era, but it is a rousing and infuriating first read of history and those who, often anonymously, make it.