A damning report card presenting a distressingly exhaustive array of pandemic fumbles.
The authors of All the Devils Are Here examine how plutocratic government agencies and self-serving politicians critically mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic.
In their latest eye-opening collaboration, Nocera and McLean document countless mistakes and their consequences in a “series of cascading dominoes.” In the early months of the pandemic, Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force’s obsession with repatriating Americans abroad in China, combined with a marked lack of urgency and transparency from Chinese government officials, delayed deployment of much-needed testing and quarantines. Since then, with death tolls reaching more than 1 million (and counting), supply-chain shortages, hospital overflow, and black-market equipment fraud have persisted. Conveyed in cogent prose, with an impeccably researched timeline, the authors’ analysis includes scathing profiles of a host of characters, particularly Ron DeSantis and Andrew Cuomo, who both bungled with rollout of lockdowns and masking. It became a scenario with innumerable variables related to health and illness outcome disparities determined by race, insurance level, income, and age. As the authors show, nursing homes were particularly vulnerable, with many facing lethal staffing shortages. Exacerbated by a reckless, indifferent Trump, masking choices became “a symbol of one’s politics,” like social distancing and vaccination, while slanderous personal attacks prevented scientists from sharing professional insights. Nocera and McLean also fairmindedly highlight a successful enterprise embedded beneath the pandemic-year failures: Operation Warp Speed, an initiative aimed at accelerating vaccine distribution. This endeavor demonstrated the governmental capacity to work cooperatively with the biomedical industry and develop firm leadership roles and real solutions. At the same time, the hotly debated mistakes were epic, and the authors’ text emphasizes how deep and damaging they became. Interestingly, though their report is very much about America’s failure in a crisis, it also frighteningly addresses how “the mores of capitalism have encroached upon the morals of society, most notably in caring for the sick and the elderly.”
A damning report card presenting a distressingly exhaustive array of pandemic fumbles.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780593331026
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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