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4.3 AVERAGE
4.3 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
I will be recommending this to all my friends!
adventurous
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
Riveting. Must read especially headed into 2025. There are some heroes out there for sure, but a lot of misguided people and institutions intended to keep public health system working for us. The intentions of those people aren't always in favor of "public health." This book got me from the first page and I couldn't put it down. And now I can't stop thinking about it.
A great read. As someone who works in infectious disease epidemiology, has worked to understand what people think about COVID -19 and tried to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake, I am well acquainted with these stories but they way they are told here are so clear and accessible. I teach my students chunks of this history in public health decision making, but feel like this will be a key read for the students in my Evidence Based Decision Making class.
I was expecting this book to mostly cover the time period after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic but was very pleasantly surprised by how much time was spent on the lives of several of the relevant but lesser known (at least to me) individuals before the pandemic started. The book timeline doesn't reach 2020 until over halfway in. Like in everything else I've read by him, Lewis has an incredible ability to vividly narrate the experiences of others.
Another fun part of the book for me was the overlap with the healthcare and data engineering side of my life, as I've met in person with DJ Patil, Josh Wills, Bob Kocher, and Todd Park, with the latter two deeply connected to an earlier version of the company I'm still at. Todd is one of the most amazing people I've ever met but Lewis inaccurately describes him as having "created three different billion-dollar health care technology companies, and then gone to serve for three years under President Obama ..." Athena Health would have been the only one. Todd left Castlight in 2009 to work in the Obama administration in 2009 before any significant technical work had begun on what became the Castlight platform. When I joined in 2011, the valuation was well under one billion. Lewis is presumably counting Devoted Health as the third, though Devoted wasn't founded until 2017.
Another fun part of the book for me was the overlap with the healthcare and data engineering side of my life, as I've met in person with DJ Patil, Josh Wills, Bob Kocher, and Todd Park, with the latter two deeply connected to an earlier version of the company I'm still at. Todd is one of the most amazing people I've ever met but Lewis inaccurately describes him as having "created three different billion-dollar health care technology companies, and then gone to serve for three years under President Obama ..." Athena Health would have been the only one. Todd left Castlight in 2009 to work in the Obama administration in 2009 before any significant technical work had begun on what became the Castlight platform. When I joined in 2011, the valuation was well under one billion. Lewis is presumably counting Devoted Health as the third, though Devoted wasn't founded until 2017.
informative
tense
medium-paced
Michael Lewis really knows how to make science thrilling. This is a story about COVID, but it's mostly not. The roots of our pandemic response and failures go way back. And we owe our lives to a small group who read the signs, did the math, and did the right thing in the face of stunning failures of leadership across state and federal levels.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
A few too many “flashback” type stories and he doesn’t include citations (which is preferred for a nonfiction book). The focus on the state of California makes it seem like no other states mounted a response or did anything to address the barriers that they faced. As an epidemiologist, I don’t think I’d recommend this book to people wanting to learn more about the pandemic or pandemic response generally.
Wonderful book. Well written to make the background of this scary pandemic understood. I think my whole family would like this book. My husband would be interested in the subject matter, my daughter would like the medical information & my son because of the statistics.
The stories provide a new angle to the public health landscape of the country. Quite interesting reading, although a little bit to the dramatic side. There were minor factual inaccuracies regarding the unfolding of Covid, which didn't really damage effect of the main narratives. However, the depth of analysis did not match those in books by the author that dealt with financial issues, which he is an expert.