 In this video, I will be sharing the top reviews of the book called, The Premonition. A Pandemic Story, authored by Michael Lewis who is the best-selling author of Liars Poker, The Money Culture, The New New Thing, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Panic, Home Game, The Big Short, and Boomerang, among other works, Lives in Berkeley California, with his wife and three children. But before we get to the reviews let's see a little bit of what this book is about. 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. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis taught and brilliant non-fiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet on these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A 13-year-old girl's science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public health officer uses her worm's eye view to see what the CDC misses and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of descending doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic, brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu. Everything, that is, accept official permission to implement their work. Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the Internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in. Now let's get to the reviews. Perkins from the United States says 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 Trump is hardly mentioned and the main villain is the CDC, a villain you think these critics would approve of. The book is also pretty tough on Democratic California governor, Gavin Newsom. Of course, this would mean actually reading the book to find this out, which I doubt most of the trolls did. What's different is that Lewis conveys an element of advocacy and even anger you don't see in his other books. I do hope the history books get it right about how the U.S. response was botched. The watchword for these diseases is, early detection, early response. Retaining these diseases in their infancy is critical. You may recall that at some point Mike Pence was put in charge of the COVID effort, which showed that Trump didn't take it seriously. Pence's solution was to have prayer meetings. Going back to the Reagan era, the head of the CDC had become a political appointee. Pence, an evangelical, favored hiring evangelicals which in this case included Deborah Bix and Robert Redfield. Both showed some serious lapses of judgment. For example, after COVID broke out in China, numerous Americans flew home from there. Redfield was urged to test these folks when they arrived with a possible quarantine, but he refused, saying he was not going to treat them as prisoners. So they were free to blend into the general population and spread the disease. For all his criticisms of public health agencies, Lewis should have included a section on how grossly underfunded public health is in the U.S. Libby from the United States says Michael Lewis held my attention in this riveting account about how the U.S. met the threat of COVID-19, a virus that made 2020 the most challenging year that many of us had ever faced. This book gave me an inside look into ways in which our healthcare system failed in the most difficult crisis they had faced since the 1918 flu epidemic. However, Lewis also documents many valiant men and women who faced the crisis head-on with courage and intelligence. Unfortunately, many of them met with bureaucratic roadblocks that stymied their progress. It was worth reading the book just to gain a more complete understanding of the role of the CDC during the pandemic. What I gathered made me conclude that the CDC is excellent for after the fact studies and data collecting, but as foot soldiers on the front lines in a war with a disease, there were huge deficiencies. Lewis includes some of the histories of the CDC, back to the resignation of CDC director David Sensor in 1976 after a debacle over the swine flu vaccine. This helped me understand why the CDC is the way it is and the need for brave people who are not yes people to lead this vital institution. Currently, the director is a presidential appointee. Lewis seems to think it operated better when the director rose through the ranks and was put forward by colleagues. Kathleen from Mississippi says Lewis has written a historical account of pandemic planning in the United States through the administrations of Bush, Obama and Trump. It ends up being a scathing indictment of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The author highlights the shortcomings of the United States health system when facing a pandemic. By not having a centralized national health care system, the US was not able to quickly put in place a pandemic response. Lewis focuses on the stories of a group of medical doctors and scientists who persevered to get the US to take the pandemic response seriously. This group of heroes were brilliant, dedicated, resourceful and conscientious. They understood all too well how unprepared America was to fight a pandemic. There was Charity Dean, a deputy director of California's Department of Public Health. There were Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecker who had helped to shape pandemic planning in the George W. Bush administration and worked tirelessly to mitigate the unfolding catastrophe. Lewis points to Joe Dorisi who developed an extremely useful technology for rapid viral testing but was thwarted by institutional recalcitrance. And Bob Glass, a scientist whose 13-year-old daughter's science fair project became the basis for the social distancing model of disease control. Carmel from the United States says 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 technology and resources now than back then. We had evolved as a medical community. We had people who knew and cared at the helm. Not so much. This book exposes our nation's flawed and siloed underbelly. It smashes many of the myths and common beliefs about how we think, or want, our governmental and private agencies to function. It explains how the individuals who have the knowledge, the ideas, the desire to solve the problem can be buried beneath bureaucracies and political self-interest and self-protection. It shows once again that the optics outweigh the deadly realities when it comes to the response by those in charge, except for the brave few. Chandler from California says fascinating insider story of how COVID-19 was mishandled by the U.S. government, the CDC, and the WHO. Michael Lewis' 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 telling 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 U.S. fighting this thing differently, it was, and as, every country in the world. Maybe that would be good for a sequel. Hilarious by the way that Charity Dean started in Santa Barbara, and the book describes her visiting the old age home where my grandmother lives. One of the big things that at this point is lost on many of us, is that until the January 2020, there was a chance to lock down quick on the virus and contain it. And because of the total lack of leadership, that chance was lost. This book describes how the Bush administration, I had thought it was Obama, but nope, had even put into place a plan, which had a lot of research behind it, for how to handle this very thing. But it was dismantled by Trump and the CDC. I have provided the sources of this video in the description, please feel free to check them out. Thank you for watching this video, if you like this video then please subscribe to the channel and share this video.