Harvard Book Store Virtual Event: Michael Lewis

presenting The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
in conversation with MAYA SHANKAR

arvard Book Store, Politics and Prose, and Books & Books are thrilled to welcome MICHAEL LEWIS—author of the acclaimed, internationally bestselling Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short—for a discussion of his latest book, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story. He will be joined in conversation by internationall renowned cognitive scientist MAYA SHANKAR, former Senior Advisor in the Obama White House and former Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations under Ban Ki-moon.

Ticketing

All tickets include a hardcover copy of The Premonition.

Books bundled with tickets will be shipped out after the event. Please note: we are unable to ship internationally.

About The Premonition

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about.

Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19.

The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu . . . everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

Praise for Michael Lewis

“Saturation reporting, conceptual thinking of a high order, a rich sense of humor, and talent to burn.” —Tom Wolfe

“[Lewis] has a genius for unearthing tales of the counterintuitive.” —Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review

“Lewis is the kind of writer who creates his own weather system.” —John Lanchester, London Review of Books