Lewis’s usual approach is to take a group of characters to flesh out a complicated theme and turn it into a gripping story. And he’s done it again here.

Replete with unforgettable characters, taut pacing and the stakes of life or death (or, in this case, death or less death), you can see each scene of the blockbuster play out on the screen of your mind. Then, you remember the page-turner you are ripping through is essentially about bureaucracy and its failings.

... maddening.

Lewis is superb at this kind of thing. It is tremendous fun, tremendously told. It is a measure of his skill that he can talk about epidemiologists who call themselves Wolverines and not make them sound like utter ninnies.

If this is a superhero story, it’s one that lacks a supervillain. Though you might expect a book by Lewis about the US government’s grotesque mishandling of the pandemic to be a late entry into the Big Trump Book canon, the 45th president is a mercifully peripheral presence in its pages.

Michael Lewis explains [his] 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. He is funny, angry, and acute. As a reviewer, I find myself wanting to quote practically every other sentence in the book.

... disappointing.

It is amazing to me that intelligent people in 2021 can survey the past year and conclude that some alternative set of non-pharmaceutical interventions would have made an appreciable difference in the spread of this magnificently resilient virus. But many such people do believe that, including the author of this book and its ostensible heroes.

As a diagnostic saga, the narrative of The Premonition makes for compelling reading...Lewis writes of the quest for an improved public health response to such devastating crises as an extended set piece in fearless and iconoclastic scientific inquiry, calling to mind the tense, high-stakes storyline of a Michael Crichton thriller or an episode of House.