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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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