When a book interrupts your reading

Reading for me has always been a compulsion, mostly driven by curiosity. I was intrigued before I knew what letters were. I traced them with my fingers—or by moving my head, which drove my mother nuts—on whatever happened to be in front of me: milk cartons, product boxes, books, cans, whatever. And when I understood letters to be the gateway to knowing everything I could hardly wait to decipher them. 

I don't know how old I was when I proudly sounded out my first word. It was on a box on the bathroom shelf and I was attracted to it because the letters were large and clear. 

"What's Kotex?" I asked.

My fascination with the written word remains and I've been working my way through three books. One a mystery novel (a quick read), one a physics tome (a difficult read), and one a history (a long read). But when I learned that Michael Lewis had published a new book I immediately drove to Powell's and bought it. All others were cast aside as I sat down with one of my favorite authors.

Michael Lewis's new book, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story is as good as any of his previous efforts and, like The Fifth Risk, relates to recent history. It's the story of a small group of health professionals and scientists who realize early that a pandemic is on its way.

Lewis has the ability to turn just about any aspect of American life into a detective story. He's the author of Money Ball and The Big Short, both of which were made into popular movies. If you're wondering how even Lewis could make the business of baseball or the 2008 monetary crisis entertaining reading, the secret is in the characters. In The Premonition they are a county health officer (dragon), a "redneck" epidemiologist, and "the pandemic thinker."

These three, along with a fascinating group of mismatched others, including a group of doctors calling themselves "the wolverines," recognize the approaching pandemic danger and struggle to stop it. Given Trump's denial and roadblocks, what they accomplished is impressive. Like the characters in Lewis's other books, with a few exceptions, these characters are essentially unknowns, people doing their jobs—jobs they love—often with poor compensation and little if any praise. They are in fact what the right disdainfully calls the deep state.

You will like the characters. You will cheer for them and share their heartbreaks, and in the end you will recognize their greatness. They are representative of all those who persevere against odds, often at risk to themselves, to do the public service work that government, in all its iterations, requires.

Books like this and authors like Michael Lewis make me happy that I learned to read early, because even though I'll never know everything I've learned that the world is filled with talented authors who tell terrific stories. As John Williams said about Lewis in the New York Times Book Review, "I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it." So would I.