Books, Books, Books

 Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

There are about three book groups represented in the group I hike with and a couple of weeks ago all of them were gearing up to read the same book, this one!  I put it on hold at the library and got it right away.  If you haven't already read it, you should.  

From the publisher:

"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."

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles.

This is the recent book by the author of A Gentleman in Moscow and The Rules of Civility.  The following is my review for NetGalley.

It’s 1954 and 18-year-old Emmett Watson is being returned to his family home by the sheriff after serving time in a juvie-jail for involuntary manslaughter. The hitch is that the banker who has repossessed his Nebraskan home is waiting at Emmet's old home to finalize the foreclosure. There’s no family to welcome him as his mother walked off years earlier and his father, lacking the farming skills necessary to keep a place going, has passed on to his heavenly reward. His eight-year-old brother Billy is in the care of the next-door neighbor. With no roots to bind them, Emmett and Billy decide to take a road trip on the Lincoln Highway to California where they hope to reunite with their mother.

When the sheriff brought Emmett home, he also unwittingly provided transport for two friend inmates, Duchess and Woolly, who hitched a ride in the sheriff’s trunk. This is a road trip like no other. For starters their trip to California kicks off with a hoboing train ride to New York. The journey is filled the characters along the way. For readers of Ivan Doig and William Kent Krueger.

Conditional Citizens:  On Belonging in America by Laila Lalani.

I bought this at my favorite indie bookstore in Reno when I was there in November.  Her fiction, The Other Americans, was the community reads choice for Deschutes County last year.

"What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth--such as national origin, race, and gender--that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still their shadows today."  Could I pass the citizen test?  I doubt it.