With his trademark blend of trenchant observation and insightful analysis, in his first book, Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis revealed the excesses of Wall Street; in The Big Short, he introduced us to the traders who bet against the market leading to the 2007-2008 financial crisis; in Moneyball he explained the statistical revolution in professional sports, and in his last book, The Fifth Risk, he took on the Trump administration. Now, in THE PREMONITION, he will expose the failure of that administration to handle the pandemic.
THE PREMONITION: A Pandemic Story
by Michael Lewis
Norton, May 2021
The news out of China was not good: there were signs that a new disease might be big―scary big, like a brushfire coming at you uphill. Authorities, medical and political, saw no reason to worry and little need for tests. Michael Lewis’s riveting nonfiction thriller pits a rogue band of visionaries, working under the radar, against the weight and disinterest of officialdom. It is a race against time, and the deadline is now… or yesterday.
Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, and The Undoing Project. He holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from Princeton and a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.
Even as millions of Americans suspect they’re suffering from a gastrointestinal disorder, they may spend years in pain before they figure out just what’s going on with their gut. And while irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is commonly diagnosed, SIBO, a disorder with basically all the same symptoms, is not. So, what is SIBO? The acronym stands for Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth, a disorder in which bacteria that usually grow in other parts of the gut start to proliferate and take up residence in the small intestine. This causes a whole confluence of symptoms, ranging from bloating and cramps, to uncontrollable weight gain or weight loss, to even malnutrition when the bacteria eat up vital nutrients from our food. Even though several studies have shown that as many as 84 percent of patients with IBS also tested positive for SIBO, it remains understudied and underdiagnosed. After decades of dealing with debilitating symptoms with no relief, Shivan Sarna’s life changed when she was diagnosed with SIBO. As she eliminated her symptoms one by one through lifestyle changes and help from her physicians, she started to synthesize her personal experiences with Western and naturopathic medicine and dedicate herself to advocating for those suffering from SIBO, or those who think they could be.
The clitoris is the final taboo in the world of gender equality. For centuries, science thought women were inside-out men, and anxiety about female sexuality framed attitudes and perpetuated inaccurate information. The reality of women’s sexuality was ignored, repressed, or defamed. THE SWEETNESS OF VENUS takes a rigorous romp through science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, to unravel the history of the clitoris, and then uses this context to explore the language, literature, and art around it. Much of the clitoris’s story has been defined by those who discovered and mapped her. However, even after the true anatomy of the clitoris was finally fully mapped with 3D imaging in 2005, it still hardly gets a mention in America’s bestselling teen sex education book for girls, and no mention at all in the parallel book for boys. Equality when it comes to sex has not been achieved, yet.