A damning report card presenting a distressingly exhaustive array of pandemic fumbles.
The authors of All the Devils Are Here examine how plutocratic government agencies and self-serving politicians critically mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic.
In their latest eye-opening collaboration, Nocera and McLean document countless mistakes and their consequences in a “series of cascading dominoes.” In the early months of the pandemic, Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force’s obsession with repatriating Americans abroad in China, combined with a marked lack of urgency and transparency from Chinese government officials, delayed deployment of much-needed testing and quarantines. Since then, with death tolls reaching more than 1 million (and counting), supply-chain shortages, hospital overflow, and black-market equipment fraud have persisted. Conveyed in cogent prose, with an impeccably researched timeline, the authors’ analysis includes scathing profiles of a host of characters, particularly Ron DeSantis and Andrew Cuomo, who both bungled with rollout of lockdowns and masking. It became a scenario with innumerable variables related to health and illness outcome disparities determined by race, insurance level, income, and age. As the authors show, nursing homes were particularly vulnerable, with many facing lethal staffing shortages. Exacerbated by a reckless, indifferent Trump, masking choices became “a symbol of one’s politics,” like social distancing and vaccination, while slanderous personal attacks prevented scientists from sharing professional insights. Nocera and McLean also fairmindedly highlight a successful enterprise embedded beneath the pandemic-year failures: Operation Warp Speed, an initiative aimed at accelerating vaccine distribution. This endeavor demonstrated the governmental capacity to work cooperatively with the biomedical industry and develop firm leadership roles and real solutions. At the same time, the hotly debated mistakes were epic, and the authors’ text emphasizes how deep and damaging they became. Interestingly, though their report is very much about America’s failure in a crisis, it also frighteningly addresses how “the mores of capitalism have encroached upon the morals of society, most notably in caring for the sick and the elderly.”
A damning report card presenting a distressingly exhaustive array of pandemic fumbles.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780593331026
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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