A Covid-19 reference as comprehensive as it is devastating.
Gruner presents an overview of the Covid-19 pandemic in America that also looks at global, historical, and political complexities to add context to the crisis.
Even before the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019, American leaders like presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had anticipated the possibility of a global outbreak—their preparations and warnings were largely disregarded by the Trump administration, per the author. Yet despite Trump’s fumbling of the public messaging about the pandemic, his administration’s Operation Warp Speed achieved the extraordinary by fast-tracking Covid-19 vaccines in just seven months. (“By reducing the drug makers’ financial risk, Warp Speed greatly accelerated the development of the COVID vaccines.”) Gruner maintains a consistently nonpartisan approach, highlighting the tyrannical overreach of some Republican governors during lockdowns while noting then–Vice President Joe Biden’s early vaccine skepticism during the 2020 election. The author discusses similar outbreaks in America’s past, like the 1918 Spanish Flu and the 1957 Asian Flu, to explore the government’s role in managing public health crises in a nation that holds personal freedom (inconsistently, perhaps) as sacrosanct. Writing with future historians in mind, Gruner systematically examines the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on the United States in 10 chapters that incorporate over 80 charts, tables, and graphs. Red and blue states’ differing strategies regarding lockdowns and reopenings serve as case studies, offering hard data that tracks deaths both caused by and related to the virus as well as its economic and educational impact. To call the book thorough would be an understatement; over 100 pages of appendices and citations include state and country demographics, term definitions, acronyms, and a robust index to supplement an already well-structured and succinct resource. The author’s approach is dispassionate, allowing the massive death toll and preventable mistakes to speak for themselves. Responsibility is placed on political leaders, media, entertainment figures, and individual citizens without Gruner ever taking an accusatory tone; the stark and undeniable numbers do the job.
A Covid-19 reference as comprehensive as it is devastating.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781737823155
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Libratum Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
