{"id":8517,"date":"2021-12-14T07:31:12","date_gmt":"2021-12-14T07:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8517"},"modified":"2022-01-05T12:20:43","modified_gmt":"2022-01-05T12:20:43","slug":"the-premonition-by-michael-lewis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8517","title":{"rendered":"The Premonition by Michael Lewis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A Pandemic Story<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Allen Lane UK\/Norton US 4 May 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n

320pp, hardback, UK \u00a325\/ US $30<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by N.J. Cooper<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reading any of Michael Lewis\u2019s brilliant accounts of mismanagement and the mavericks who understand it and see further into a better future than anyone else, making sense of both triumph and disaster, I am often remind of Warren Buffett.\u00a0 Buffett makes no secret of the methods he uses to choose his investments and so you\u2019d have thought every stock picker in the world would copy those methods and become as successful, but of course they don\u2019t and aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Michael Lewis lays bare his own strategy in the introduction to this magnificent account of the thinkers and scientists who knew a pandemic would come and tried to make successive American governments prepare for it, while being stymied over and over again by organizations and individuals with other agenda.\u00a0 He writes: \u2018A freshly mutated virus in China made its way towards the United States.\u00a0 This was just the sort of management test I\u2019d imagined when writing The Fifth Risk<\/em>.\u00a0 How could I not write about it?\u00a0 But as I got into it, and found these wonderful characters to tell the story through…\u2019\u00a0 No one else writing serious, popular non-fiction manages to follow Lewis in finding \u2018marvellous characters\u2019 and using their stories to analyze complex subjects.\u00a0 I can\u2019t think why not.\u00a0 It works.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here Lewis\u2019s characters include: Laura Glass, a thirteen-year-old with a powerful interest in both science and computer modelling; Doctor Charity Dean, chief health officer for Santa Barbara County, who \u2018from a very young age, when she was feeling low \u2026cheered herself up by reading books on bubonic plague.\u00a0 The ones with the grisly drawings she liked best.\u2019; Rajeev Venkayya and Richard Hatchett, who both worked for the White House and \u2018thought the United States government was paying too much attention to the threats posed by people and too little by those posed by nature.\u2019; Joe DeRisi, who \u2018thought scientists should be encouraged to look at stuff without having any idea of what they were looking for\u2019 and who found crucial \u2018stuff\u2019 about the behaviour of viruses and how to assess them.\u00a0 And so it goes on.\u00a0 These people and many others join together in their attempts to understand and mitigate the effects of the pandemic they knew would come.<\/p>\n

Michael Lewis explains their characters, interests and backgrounds, the papers they write and the work that they do in the easiest of prose, bringing exactly the right personal details to make the stories sing.\u00a0 He is funny, angry, and acute.\u00a0 As a reviewer, I find myself wanting to quote practically every other sentence in the book.\u00a0 In the introduction he writes that he wants readers to decide whether there are implications in his story that he has missed.\u00a0 I am sure he hasn\u2019t missed anything but what I take from it, apart from knowing more about viruses in general and Covid-19 in particular, and his extraordinary characters, is that our societies need to value real, evidence-based knowledge higher than anything else because it is beyond price.\u00a0 We need to listen to those mavericks and oddballs who are too modest and interested in their arcane subjects to thrust themselves on to public stages.\u00a0 We need to challenge group think and what Lewis unforgettably describes as \u2018bureaucrats who suffer from malignant obedience\u2019.\u00a0 We need to be less frightened of getting something wrong than doing nothing at all.<\/p>\n

Sprinkled through this fascinating study of brilliance and its frustration are snippets that should be read \u2013 and heard \u2013 by anyone in any kind of management anywhere:\u00a0 the fact that in most companies ten per cent of the people do ninety per cent of the work;\u00a0 that those who really understand why something is going wrong are at level six in their organizations, a long way below the policy-makers and the million-dollar earners;\u00a0 that damage can be done by promoting the wrong people, even in the interests of e.g. diversity; and that people convinced of their own virtue can be the most dangerous of all.\u00a0 When Charity Dean was at medical school, members of the church to which she had belonged since childhood, were outraged that she had come top of her year; they believed that \u2018 \u201cI should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class.\u00a0 No better.\u201d \u2019<\/p>\n

The Premonition<\/em> offers many different angels and devils.\u00a0 Readers will swing from astonished admiration to sickening rage again and again, but Charity Dean\u2019s church\u2019s attempt to impose ignorance and failure on such a star, who has so much to offer, summed up for me everything that is wrong with the world.\u00a0 Thank goodness that it also has Michael Lewis in it and the whole cast of extraordinary characters to which he introduces us in his latest masterpiece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

* A 2021 Notable Book<\/p>\n

Reviewed by N.J. Cooper<\/p>\n

What I take from it, apart from knowing more about viruses in general and Covid-19 in particular, and his extraordinary characters, is that our societies need to value real, evidence-based knowledge higher than anything else because it is beyond price. We need to listen to those mavericks and oddballs who are too modest and interested in their arcane subjects to thrust themselves on to public stages. We need to challenge group think and what Lewis unforgettably describes as \u2018bureaucrats who suffer from malignant obedience\u2019. We need to be less frightened of getting something wrong than doing nothing at all […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8517"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8567,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8517\/revisions\/8567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}