QUARANTINE LIFE FROM CHOLERA TO COVID-19

A breezy take on plagues and peoples by a writer with a “disease fascination.”

Nixon, a professor of medical humanities, scans history to find support for a series of tweet-ish theses: “Listen. To. Women.” “Contagion is community.” “The kids are not all right.” There are worthy if obvious points throughout. The author, a mother of two, worries about when schools will reopen and what the benchmark for that will be: “And I mean an evidence-based benchmark, not simply a choice made because we’re tired of being careful.” She is also good at holding up a mirror to social norms that deserve to be remade, including our willingness to overlook the bad things of the world, including plagues and famine, as long as they’re not happening to us, and the American tendency to be driven by fear. On the latter point, Nixon rightly observes that if we are truly to be free of any risk of contracting a communicable disease, we’d need to lock ourselves in our houses, isolate, and spend our time sanitizing and overcooking everything in sight. “This sounds like a sad and hollow existence to me,” she observes—and never mind that several survivors of the 1918 influenza pandemic whom she quotes counsel modern-day plague navigators to do just that. Apart from a few witty notes on our history of “surviving plague after plague,” Nixon’s points have been addressed by many other writers in the current flood of pandemic-related literature, and her suggestion at the end that we all make nice with vaccine deniers and other enemies of common sense is cloying: “I’m convinced that the differences I see on the surface are red herrings meant to divide us, to distract us from the ways we could be banding together.” Peace and love are all well and good, but even better is a shot in the arm.

A nonessential entry in a crowded field.