The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

This is a book about the start of the pandemic and how public health officers and departments responded to it. It’s sort of a sequel to The Fifth Risk, which was about how the Trump administration failed to staff critical government departments.

I didn’t love it, largely because of Lewis’s writing style. He goes deep on the people in the stories. He fixates on them and digs deep into their lives and histories and why they do what they do. Sometimes this goes all the back to their birth and childhood.

…why?

This is a book about the pandemic. And while I appreciate Charity Dean and all she did for the California Department of Health, how is her relationship with her parents relevant to the pandemic?

A lot of times, Lewis would go really, really deep on someone or some institution and I’d be wondering, “what does this have to do with the larger story?” The answer was… nothing. It had nothing to do with anything. Lewis just wanted to talk about it.

(I did learn about the JASONs though, which is super-cool.)

The larger story of the book is how dysfunctional America’s response to the pandemic was. How we were poorly prepared (Trump had shut down the department responsible for planning), and how medical companies tried to extort the government for money (example: they used to give the government volume discounts on supplies, but stopped doing this when the pandemic hit and the government needed things badly and quickly).

I love the topic, but Lewis’s writing style was a problem. He’s a bit like Rose George, but in a different way – their specific style really gets in the way of the point they want to get across.

(I vaguely remember reading Flash Boys and Boomerang and feeling the same way. Weirdly, I was a fan of The Fifth Risk. No idea what the specific difference is.)