Though repetitive and a little foulmouthed, this is a worthy summary of where we’ve been and where we are in the pandemic.
Former Newsweek columnist Burleigh turns in an opinionated, fast-moving tale of the coronavirus pandemic.
Beginning in what she calls the “early days in the shit show,” the author limns a portrait of a perfect storm: a virus that, though in a family well known to science, defied identification and treatment and, as a vaccine was being developed, encountered fundamentalist Christians in the Trump administration such as Deborah Birx, who cut her teeth moralizing about the victims of AIDS instead of actually doing anything about it. Trump professed to know nothing about pandemics, though of course he claimed to know more than the doctors did, and it was a well-rehearsed bit of Trump lore that his grandfather died of the Spanish flu, “leaving a German-speaking widow with three kids to found a small building company in Queens, a death that forever altered the trajectory of the Trump clan.” Trump knew, Burleigh charges, that Covid-19 was much worse than the flu, but he snubbed the U.N., the World Health Organization, and any other group working to fight it: “Fuck the WHO and fuck your tests. We can do it better.” That hubris, of course, contributed to the deaths of more than 530,000 (and counting) Americans. Coupled with giveaways to Trump’s corporate cronies and an otherwise corrupt regime hostile to science and expertise, the entire ordeal has been a shit show of epic proportions. The book is a useful, page-turning, blow-by-blow account of events, though seemingly written and edited in a hurry: The author repeats verbatim the etiology that coronavirus originated in bats (though she does offer a section on the lab leak hypothesis), that pharmaceutical companies were given $22 billion to fix things, and that vaccine hesitancy has been one of many problems medicine has had to face.
Though repetitive and a little foulmouthed, this is a worthy summary of where we’ve been and where we are in the pandemic.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64421-180-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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