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only remarkable hardship and suffering, but also resilience, solidarity, and hope; taken as a whole, this is a vital historical document of a year-plus that none of us will ever forget.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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BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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