An urgent, meticulously documented argument for better preparedness in future crises.
A hard look at widespread failed governance during a global pandemic.
The Trump administration’s dismal response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been reported in numerous books and articles. The findings presented in this riveting analysis synthesize and go far beyond that material. The 34 members of the Covid Crisis Group, directed by Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and including prominent scientists, scholars, physicians, and public health experts, conducted 195 listening sessions with more than 270 participants, representing a broad range of expertise. Also drawing on their own background research, they offer an authoritative assessment of “the world war” against Covid-19, particularly in America. “No country’s performance,” they have found, “is more disappointing than that of the United States.” Although they agree that Trump “was a comorbidity” in the fight, his incompetence was not the only obstacle. The nation, they assert, “faced a twenty-first-century challenge with a system designed for nineteenth-century threats.” At the federal level, “confusion and friction” in myriad departments obscured “who was in charge of what problems.” Action plans emerged as “a jargon laden catalog of problems” and “statements of goals,” with “little in it about what people would actually do.” When the Trump administration threw responsibility to the states, it fell onto “a patchwork quilt of decentralized, detached, autonomous, and often contradictory operation plans and policies.” The nation sorely lacked a network of biomedical surveillance, which would have tracked the progress of the outbreak, testing results, and treatment protocols. Compared with Germany and South Korea, the U.S. evinced “splintered crisis management.” As the contributors clearly show, “what the Covid war exposed, what every recent crisis has exposed—even in Iraq and Afghanistan—is the erosion of operational capabilities in much of American civilian governance.” Crafting a system of national health security is crucial, where executive leadership is “aided by a much stronger core of trained, deployable public health regulars.”
An urgent, meticulously documented argument for better preparedness in future crises.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781541703803
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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