Essential, enlightening reading in a time of panic and plague.
New Scientist journalist MacKenzie serves up a vivid account of the origins and fortunes of coronavirus, warning that worse may be yet to come.
There are several takeaways in this sharp survey of the current (as of this writing) pandemic. The first is that, decidedly, not enough was done—not by China, which failed to alert the world to the arrival of the novel virus until well after it had spread outside the country; and certainly not by the U.S., whose government seemed to want to wish the virus away. “Once public health fails and contagion appears anywhere, it goes everywhere,” writes the author. Even though COVID-19 (whose formal name is SARS-CoV–2) has shown some signs of abating, the pandemic has exposed gaping holes in the public health regimes of countries around the world, with a few exceptions—Hong Kong, for example, locked down early on and endured the plague with only 715 cases and four deaths as of the end of March 2020. Charting the etiology and course of the virus, MacKenzie observes that nearly everything about its origins and spread offers lessons on how not to act when the next pandemic comes. She goes on to warn that another pandemic is sure to come, perhaps soon, probably some variant of bird flu and, in any case, “worse than the one we are fighting now.” The measures she suggests include better monitoring and reporting of emergent diseases, stockpiling supplies such as face masks and antibiotics to combat diseases that are already known to us, developing “surge capacity in manufacturing,” and holding governments accountable for things said and promises made. For the conspiracy theorists in the crowd, MacKenzie also notes that “one thing we can say for sure: Covid-19 was not created in a lab.”
Essential, enlightening reading in a time of panic and plague.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-92424-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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