A well-informed accounting of the nation under siege.
Another look at the chaos of the Trump administration and its disastrous handling of the pandemic.
Washington Post health policy reporter Abutaleb and the Post’s economics editor Paletta interviewed more than 180 people, including government officials, health experts, and advisers; reviewed text messages and internal documents; and read thousands of pages of emails to offer a thoroughly damning picture of America’s response to the pandemic. Their portrayal of a dysfunctional White House is likely to come as no surprise to readers who have followed mainstream news: “Much has been written about Trump’s temperament, paranoia, nonexistent attention span, disaffection, susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and disregard for facts,” the authors write. “It was all true.” He fostered a “strident, combative atmosphere,” pitting aides against one another “like roosters at a cockfight, gladiator matches for his amusement,” and he became incensed when anyone garnered more press attention than he did. Focused on reelection, he saw the virus as an annoying distraction and an increasing case count as a personal affront. He was abetted by staff who shared his disparagement of scientific and medical advice, feared for their jobs, or were “fluent in the kind of sycophancy Trump required”—or all of the above. From the first, the response was fraught with hostility, tension, and the turmoil that occurs when no one is in charge: not Health and Human Services director Alex Azar, an arrogant micromanager; not CDC director Robert Redfield, too unassertive to take on the president; not physicians Deborah Birx or Anthony Fauci, who incited such hatred that they were inundated with death threats. “The whole pandemic response,” the authors reveal, “was managed through power, intimidation, and bullying,” and “deep polarization” in government led to “even deeper political divisions across the country.” The authors intend their report as a warning for the future: “A dearth of public health and biodefense expertise in the government, especially in the White House,” invites peril.
A well-informed accounting of the nation under siege.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-306605-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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