A Covid-19 reference as comprehensive as it is devastating.
Gruner presents an overview of the Covid-19 pandemic in America that also looks at global, historical, and political complexities to add context to the crisis.
Even before the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019, American leaders like presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had anticipated the possibility of a global outbreak—their preparations and warnings were largely disregarded by the Trump administration, per the author. Yet despite Trump’s fumbling of the public messaging about the pandemic, his administration’s Operation Warp Speed achieved the extraordinary by fast-tracking Covid-19 vaccines in just seven months. (“By reducing the drug makers’ financial risk, Warp Speed greatly accelerated the development of the COVID vaccines.”) Gruner maintains a consistently nonpartisan approach, highlighting the tyrannical overreach of some Republican governors during lockdowns while noting then–Vice President Joe Biden’s early vaccine skepticism during the 2020 election. The author discusses similar outbreaks in America’s past, like the 1918 Spanish Flu and the 1957 Asian Flu, to explore the government’s role in managing public health crises in a nation that holds personal freedom (inconsistently, perhaps) as sacrosanct. Writing with future historians in mind, Gruner systematically examines the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on the United States in 10 chapters that incorporate over 80 charts, tables, and graphs. Red and blue states’ differing strategies regarding lockdowns and reopenings serve as case studies, offering hard data that tracks deaths both caused by and related to the virus as well as its economic and educational impact. To call the book thorough would be an understatement; over 100 pages of appendices and citations include state and country demographics, term definitions, acronyms, and a robust index to supplement an already well-structured and succinct resource. The author’s approach is dispassionate, allowing the massive death toll and preventable mistakes to speak for themselves. Responsibility is placed on political leaders, media, entertainment figures, and individual citizens without Gruner ever taking an accusatory tone; the stark and undeniable numbers do the job.
A Covid-19 reference as comprehensive as it is devastating.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781737823155
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Libratum Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
