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THE BIG FAIL

Name: THE BIG FAIL
Author: Joe Nocera
ISBN: 9780593331026

WHAT THE PANDEMIC REVEALED ABOUT WHO AMERICA PROTECTS AND WHO IT LEAVES BEHIND

by Joe Nocera & Bethany McLean ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2023

A damning report card presenting a distressingly exhaustive array of pandemic fumbles.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
INDENTURED
by Joe Nocera & Ben Strauss

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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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

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.