The U.S. response to the pandemic has already spawned a range of speedily published books. A few notable examples have come from masters of journalistic narrative, including Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright; former officials, such as Scott Gottlieb and Andy Slavitt; and newspaper reporters, especially Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. But the most significant entry so far, the book that should be an indispensable resource for future historians, is Silent Invasion by Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under President Donald Trump.

Birx’s book has received relatively little attention in the two weeks since it was published—it still has not been reviewed by The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, for instance, or sparked nearly as much chatter as Mark Esper’s less consequential memoir that was also just released. Much of the attention that has been paid to Birx has focused not on the contents of the book, but on Birx herself, who witnessed and failed to stem fatal mistakes and poor decision making (with the notable exception of vaccine development) during her almost-one-year tenure on the task force. That’s a shame, because the book is the best account we have so far of how Trump’s team botched the pandemic response so badly.

Birx does a very good job of distilling what went wrong. She repeatedly emphasizes what she identifies as the principal fault in the Trump administration’s pandemic response: a failure to recognize the importance of asymptomatic transmission (thus the book’s title). She laments testing problems, including initial refusals to enlist the private sector, mistakes at the CDC, and later failures to ramp up diagnostics. Birx also cites the CDC’s consistent failure to develop good data about the pandemic, and places this at the center of reforms she proposes toward the book’s end.