You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.3 AVERAGE
4.3 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Michael Lewis is great at finding the smart, interesting characters who tend to see the world in a different way. I learned so much about this country's lack of a proper public health system and lack of people who are willing to make tough decisions in the interest of the community. Fascinating book.
informative
medium-paced
Riveting. Incredible personalities. Did make me lose some faith in the system.
This was the first draft of the pandemic and written by an author I love. Whew! My takeaway is that there are a lot of public servants doing amazing work often under death threats. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration did, well, we all know they did worse then nothing - they purposefully sabotaged the nation's response for a calculated political gain. To use an analogy from the book: we needed a Churchill but got a lot of Chamberlains and the system's incentives have been weaponized in that sense.
informative
reflective
fast-paced
I recommend this book to anyone wanting to make sense of the pandemic. It gets you away from the news cycle and the endless uncertainties of living in the era of COVID and gives you a riveting and infuriating account of a motley crew who have answers, but are buried in positions where they are unable to affect change. It turns what is marketed as an insurmountable problem by defeatist policy makers into a run-of-the-mill problem: that of deficient systems and organisations.
I have often liked Lewis's writing because of his ability to focus on individuals and use their narratives as a lens to view larger problems. Having some background and experience in medicine and public health, however, I find his treatment here woefully one-sided - and it colors my impression of his other work as well, as I wonder what else he has glossed in his pursuit of the everyman/everywoman hero narrative. The portion that shines best is a brief exploration of the counterfactual of the vaccination program for the swine flu in the 1970s as a cautionary tale for those who seek to say that the decisions made in the COVID pandemic were obviously wrong - but this is all too brief.
This book was fascinating, also scary. Highly recommended.
3.5 stars. Everything seemed to be building to a climax... that never came. I was a bit baffled by the end. This was the problem of building up heroes in the face of the pandemic in the US. Their heroism loses credibility in the face of the full-on implosion that was the US pandemic response. It would've been nice to hear how the US model was used by other countries to show how it could've actually worked. What about Australia? New Zealand? S. Korea? Heroism seems only to be seen from a very thin, myopic lens...