A comforting, much-needed reminder that we are still all in this together.
Poignant stories from the darkest days of the pandemic.
Gilsinan, a contributing editor at the Atlantic who reported extensively on the pandemic, shares details from the lives of a variety of individuals, including a CEO, a vaccine developer, a nurse, and a funeral director. In March 2020, Huy Le, who worked for Apple and Facebook, and his mother developed Covid-19. Both spent their birthdays “sedated and paralyzed” in a hospital. Hamilton Bennett, a vaccine developer for Moderna, and his colleagues “achieved miracles” in development and testing. Chris Kiple, the CEO of Ventec, a small company outside of Seattle, led the charge to increase their ventilator production from 200 per month to one every seven minutes. Paul Cary, a former fire department paramedic in his 60s, drove 28 hours from his home in Colorado to the country’s epidemic epicenter in New York to help out. When the pandemic began, Michelle Gonzalez was working as a nurse in the Bronx. Facing shortages of tests, ventilators, and protective equipment, she was required to continually work 12-hour days with no time to eat. At the suggestion of a friend, Nikkia Rhodes, a biracial chef and culinary arts teacher from Kentucky, opened a community kitchen to help feed her community and teach her students important lessons. “Even though Covid overwhelmingly spared children and teenagers from its worst physical effects, it had utterly warped the world around them,” writes the author. “Nikkia wasn’t worried about her students’ GPAs. She was just hoping they survived this new world.” Finally, Gilsinan introduces us to Jeff Jorgenson, a funeral director working diligently to provide his services during a time when gatherings were limited or forbidden. Compassionate throughout, the author effectively conveys the struggles, fears, and sacrifices that each of these individuals faced. She also exposes many of the fatal flaws in the American medical system.
A comforting, much-needed reminder that we are still all in this together.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-86702-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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