An informative tour of the Covid-19 years.
Olsen reviews the United States’ management of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The author, an engineer and “volunteer activist by avocation,” scrupulously documents the trajectory of Covid-19’s march across the U.S. He focuses on Ravalli County, Montana, his own home, described as a “microcosm of what many communities in America have gone through.” Through this compilation of essays, interviews, and conversations, Olsen explores a diverse cross-section of perspectives regarding the government’s response to the outbreak—both liberal and conservative, satisfied or deeply discontented. The author covers the pandemic with an impressively encyclopedic thoroughness—the scientific defensibility of masks, the moral character of Anthony Fauci, the protests conducted by Black Lives Matter, and many other issues related to the crisis are painstakingly considered. At the heart of the book is a consideration of two principal subjects: the competence of the government’s response to a deadly virus and the societal response to a terrifying emergency. Unfortunately, the author argues, rational discourse was largely replaced by reflexive partisanship and manipulative demagoguery. (“Fear and anxiety are starting to drive the rhetoric, personal decisions, and sometimes even the science. Fear is a good thing amid imminent danger. But, fear of what-has-not-happened-yet is soul-crushing—we call it anxiety.”) Per Olsen, America’s management of the Covid-19 threat was riddled by a “cascade of mistakes, egos, and errors”; in the final analysis offered in this astute history, the U.S. fared poorly, an especially sad outcome since the nation’s unspectacular performance was largely avoidable. Olsen’s study is delightfully eclectic—out of this assemblage of writings emerges a genuinely vivid tableau of American opinion, expert and amateur. The author is admirably undogmatic—he respectfully takes any position offered intelligibly and in good faith seriously and provides an empirically rigorous accounting of the issues. This is a deeply satisfying book—analytically relentless, nonpartisan, and appropriately curious about the opinions of the scientific and political elite as well as those of everyday Americans.
An informative tour of the Covid-19 years.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781734233278
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Breaking Wave Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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