Indefatigable journalism supporting a case that has become so politicized that facts assume secondary importance.
An angry investigation into the source of Covid-19 that will captivate readers who retain the ability to be captivated by this seemingly interminable pandemic.
Award-winning Australian journalist Markson has devoted two years to massive research, and although many details are now public, she tells a dismaying story. In late 2019, a nasty viral pneumonia appeared in Wuhan. This was no secret to local doctors and journalists, whose reports (and many journalists themselves) quickly vanished. Only at the end of the year did the Chinese government reveal the existence of a widespread epidemic, but they added that the disease was not contagious and well under control. Many books recount the consequences of this fabrication, but Markson focuses on how the pandemic originated. Two facts stand out. First, according to scientists, Covid-19 began in a meat market in Wuhan. No local evidence exists because authorities closed and sterilized it. Second, Wuhan contains the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a top-secret research laboratory. Besides studying dangerous viruses, the institute received samples from victims early in the pandemic. Labs around the world yearned for the samples to begin studies, but China refused to share them, and they were later destroyed. That animal-to-human transmission produced the pandemic was accepted by the scientific establishment, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, with suggestions of a lab leak dismissed as racism and conspiracy theory. Admitting the absence of irrefutable proof for any one explanation, Markson comes down on the side of an accidental leak. In the final half of the book, the author presents a series of interviews, press conferences, statements, archival research, freedom-of-information snippets, and statements from Chinese whistleblowers that document a detailed coverup accepted uncritically by Western media, scientists, and global governments, with few exceptions.
Indefatigable journalism supporting a case that has become so politicized that facts assume secondary importance.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4607-6108-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 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
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