An urgent, meticulously documented argument for better preparedness in future crises.
A hard look at widespread failed governance during a global pandemic.
The Trump administration’s dismal response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been reported in numerous books and articles. The findings presented in this riveting analysis synthesize and go far beyond that material. The 34 members of the Covid Crisis Group, directed by Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and including prominent scientists, scholars, physicians, and public health experts, conducted 195 listening sessions with more than 270 participants, representing a broad range of expertise. Also drawing on their own background research, they offer an authoritative assessment of “the world war” against Covid-19, particularly in America. “No country’s performance,” they have found, “is more disappointing than that of the United States.” Although they agree that Trump “was a comorbidity” in the fight, his incompetence was not the only obstacle. The nation, they assert, “faced a twenty-first-century challenge with a system designed for nineteenth-century threats.” At the federal level, “confusion and friction” in myriad departments obscured “who was in charge of what problems.” Action plans emerged as “a jargon laden catalog of problems” and “statements of goals,” with “little in it about what people would actually do.” When the Trump administration threw responsibility to the states, it fell onto “a patchwork quilt of decentralized, detached, autonomous, and often contradictory operation plans and policies.” The nation sorely lacked a network of biomedical surveillance, which would have tracked the progress of the outbreak, testing results, and treatment protocols. Compared with Germany and South Korea, the U.S. evinced “splintered crisis management.” As the contributors clearly show, “what the Covid war exposed, what every recent crisis has exposed—even in Iraq and Afghanistan—is the erosion of operational capabilities in much of American civilian governance.” Crafting a system of national health security is crucial, where executive leadership is “aided by a much stronger core of trained, deployable public health regulars.”
An urgent, meticulously documented argument for better preparedness in future crises.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781541703803
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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