An excellent resource full of well-rendered, memorable portraits of ordinary people enduring extraordinary circumstances.
A collection of interviews about pandemic experiences from across the country.
As Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporter Saslow writes, “the virus isolated us in our own homes, our own bubbles, our own pods, our own personal hardships, our own ideological bunkers. The world contracted.” In his latest book, the author movingly documents that sense of isolation. Saslow conducted dozens of interviews with Americans of all ages and professions, and their voices—presented in lightly edited monologues—form the crux of this crucial book. Mikaela Sakal, a nurse in a dangerously understaffed Detroit hospital, discusses how her long shifts involved rushing from one emergency to the next: “Alarms are going off every minute….Every one could mean a crisis. I’d go home at night and hear phantom alarms.” Francene Bailey describes the agony of knowing she passed the virus on to her mother, who eventually died. Anthony Almojera, a longtime New York City paramedic, notes, “I pronounced more deaths in the first two weeks of April [2020] than I have in my whole career.” Presented one after the other, and uninterrupted, their stories do more than provide a patchwork portrait of the country: They also help correct the notion that, whatever your personal experience of the pandemic might have been, it was the only one. Saslow spoke to doctors, teachers, election officials, parents, nursing home residents, and countless others, and while the specifics of their days might have differed—some languished, bored, at home, while others risked their lives at thankless jobs—the book also reveals an underlying sense of shared humanity. Taken individually, the stories describe not only remarkable hardship and suffering, but also resilience, solidarity, and hope; taken as a whole, this is a vital historical document of a year-plus that none of us will ever forget.
An excellent resource full of well-rendered, memorable portraits of ordinary people enduring extraordinary circumstances.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54700-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
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