The Premonitions is Michael Lewis’s follow-up to his recent book The Fifth Risk. In fact, one might say that The Fifth Risk required that Lewis write The Premonitions. He wrote The Fifth Risk because he realized that one of the US government’s great tasks was to mitigate the risks of major disasters. Disasters like food shortages, natural disasters, nuclear confrontations, and so forth. That book didn’t talk about pandemics, but a global pandemic is precisely the type of disaster he had in mind.
Lewis had one other reason for writing the first book. The Trump administration showed no interest at all in listening to the experts whose job it was to find ways to mitigate those risks. After decades of Republicans preaching that government was the enemy and should be downsized, the Trump administration took this to its logical extreme and simply ignored any government expert whose advice it didn’t like. Which was most of them, as it turned out. And many of those experts had valuable ideas that would have done much good.
Enter The Premonitions
So, The Premonitions was a book that was almost inevitable. Some major risk that the Trump administration chose to ignore would strike at some point. It just happened to be Covid-19.
The book does not attempt to be a comprehensive list of everything that went wrong over the first year of the pandemic. Not does it spend many pages dwelling on Trump’s failures, deadly and disastrous as those failures were. Instead, Lewis found a group of scientists and public health figures who had the right ideas for battling Covid. The rest of the book is a description of what they tried to do during the pandemic. Lewis then describes why their ideas failed to take hold in the nation at large. Thus, the title The Premonitions.
The Lessons of The Premonitions
The reader should check the book out for the details. But I would classify Lewis’s explanation into a few main points. One, a health system run for corporate profit rather than individual health will perform poorly during a society-wide crisis. People will die because of this.
Two, nothing makes middle-class people into spineless cowards faster than the threat of losing a job. Most would rather pass or avoid the blame, even to the point of seeing people die in a pandemic who shouldn’t have died, than risk an unpopular decision that might cost them employment. Society is full of Neville Chamberlains. It needs more Winston Churchills.
Next, appointing people to lead government organizations for political reasons is a bad idea. People who have no experience with what their agency does cannot lead it well in times of crisis. Which is, incidentally, the most important time.
Lastly, we live in a society where too many “leaders” think leadership is the avoidance of conflict. Real leadership involves the resolution of conflict. This is a corollary to lesson two above.
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Evaluation of the Book
Michael Lewis is among the most talented writers of our time. He could write a book about toenails and make it interesting. The writing in The Premonitions, while good, wasn’t his best. The book felt a little rushed. I suppose this is natural, given its topic and the timing.
Lewis does understand something that’s easy to forget, however. Great writing, whatever the topic, is about stories. He found interesting people and related their stories. It’s up to the writer to tie the stories together, and Lewis is great at this.
For readers who like clear endings, however, this book doesn’t have one. It can’t, really, given that the pandemic isn’t over. There is no grand conclusion, and we’re left with what the subjects of the book were doing when the book had to go to press. I can be flexible when it comes to endings and closure, but even for me, this was a little lacking. So, all things considered, this books earns an 8 of 10 grade from me. People should read it with the limitations of the situation in mind.
To check out my other recent reviews, please read:
The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner
King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild
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