A review by meigs
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

5.0

I picked up this book because I knew it would tell an interesting story about a real event: how Covid was completely mismanaged. And yes, the Trump administration is responsible for spearheading  that failure. But what the book shows is the dysfunction did not start with Trump. I also knew it would have a systems slant, because when things fall apart it’s due to bad systems and almost always in corporate settings at the root of that failure is petty politics. What I was not prepared for was how deeply scared it’s left me for where we are as a nation. I realize now that the name of this book is word play. The response to Covid is a premonition of where we are as a nation (one of the people highlighted in the book has premonitions). It didn’t hit me until the very end of the book. Like oh, the Covid response is just a microcosm of how bad things really are. We are a country in collapse and about to become a failed nation state. This book lays that out through demonstrating broken systems and petty political fights at the expense of human lives. Shit is dire. I still gave it 5 stars 😭😭😭