Though repetitive and a little foulmouthed, this is a worthy summary of where we’ve been and where we are in the pandemic.
Former Newsweek columnist Burleigh turns in an opinionated, fast-moving tale of the coronavirus pandemic.
Beginning in what she calls the “early days in the shit show,” the author limns a portrait of a perfect storm: a virus that, though in a family well known to science, defied identification and treatment and, as a vaccine was being developed, encountered fundamentalist Christians in the Trump administration such as Deborah Birx, who cut her teeth moralizing about the victims of AIDS instead of actually doing anything about it. Trump professed to know nothing about pandemics, though of course he claimed to know more than the doctors did, and it was a well-rehearsed bit of Trump lore that his grandfather died of the Spanish flu, “leaving a German-speaking widow with three kids to found a small building company in Queens, a death that forever altered the trajectory of the Trump clan.” Trump knew, Burleigh charges, that Covid-19 was much worse than the flu, but he snubbed the U.N., the World Health Organization, and any other group working to fight it: “Fuck the WHO and fuck your tests. We can do it better.” That hubris, of course, contributed to the deaths of more than 530,000 (and counting) Americans. Coupled with giveaways to Trump’s corporate cronies and an otherwise corrupt regime hostile to science and expertise, the entire ordeal has been a shit show of epic proportions. The book is a useful, page-turning, blow-by-blow account of events, though seemingly written and edited in a hurry: The author repeats verbatim the etiology that coronavirus originated in bats (though she does offer a section on the lab leak hypothesis), that pharmaceutical companies were given $22 billion to fix things, and that vaccine hesitancy has been one of many problems medicine has had to face.
Though repetitive and a little foulmouthed, this is a worthy summary of where we’ve been and where we are in the pandemic.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64421-180-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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
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