Unsettling global health news brilliantly delivered by an expert.
An authoritative new history of Covid-19 and its predecessors.
Prolific, award-winning science writer Quammen bring his story up to 2022, as the pandemic enters its third year with no end in sight. Authors who begin with 2019 events in the Wuhan meat market are fated to end with an anticlimax, but Quammen, casting his net more widely, does not have this problem. In addition to a hair-raising account of the ongoing pandemic, the author delivers an insightful education on public health and an introduction to numerous deadly epidemics over the past 50 years. He also educates readers about the centurylong history of the coronavirus, which produced two nasty epidemics before the current one. Once known as a mundane cause of the common cold, the first “killer coronavirus” emerged from a Chinese food market in 2003, killing about 800 of 8,000 victims across the world before disappearing. SARS-CoV didn’t spread until symptoms developed, so it was not difficult to identify cases, trace contacts, and set effective quarantine guidelines. This was also true of the MERS-CoV epidemic that began in 2012 and killed 76 of 178 people, mostly on the Arabian Peninsula. The current pandemic remains horrendously difficult to control because asymptomatic individuals can still spread the virus. Having delivered this bad news, Quammen chronicles his tours around the world (often via Zoom due to lockdowns), grilling a Greek chorus of nearly 100 scientists and health officials whose extensive biographies fill a 43-page appendix. Skirting the mostly dismal politics displayed by national leaders, the author constructs a masterful account of viral evolution culminating in Covid-19, which has displayed the dazzling ability to circumvent our natural and then technology-enhanced immune system. Perhaps the best news is that killing a host is irrelevant; viruses give priority to multiplying and spreading, so it’s possible that Covid-19 will adapt to our adaptations and grow less virulent. One of the latest variants, Omicron, is a dramatic example.
Unsettling global health news brilliantly delivered by an expert.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982164-36-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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