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Title details for The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright - Available

The Plague Year

America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright
Eric Jason Martin
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it
"A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review
From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic.
 
Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential.
 
In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 8, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593459362
      • File size: 331241 KB
      • Duration: 11:30:05

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Completely predictable. That's the refrain throughout Wright's thorough evaluation of the year the world faced the crippling COVID-19 pandemic. Narrator Eric Jason Martin takes a documentarian approach as Wright frames the pandemic in historic terms: He provides details of the protests against precautions that took place during the 1918 influenza pandemic and points out that 2020 featured unique problems and deliberate confusion created by the Trump administration. State governors found themselves bidding against each other for needed masks and supplies, only to lose to the federal government, leaving thousands without needed protective equipment. Martin is unwaveringly direct and clear in his excellent performance, leaving listeners to wonder: What have we learned? S.P.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 3, 2021
      Pestilence, tumult, and the horror of Trumpism roil this scattershot survey of 2020. Pulitzer-winning New Yorker journalist Wright (The End of October) reviews the course of the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying upheavals, from the first wave through the summer of protest and the frenzied aftermath of the 2020 election. He emphasizes the CDC’s delays in rolling out virus tests, skimpy and chaotic procurement of personal protective equipment, and persistent efforts by President Trump to downplay the pandemic’s seriousness. Wright paints an especially revealing portrait of White House policymaking based on insider accounts by staffers including deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, who lobbied the Trump administration to take the virus more seriously. Unfortunately, the treatment of major controversies tends to be one-sided and overwrought. Wright likens the Capitol rioters to “Visigoths breaking through the gates of Rome,” treats opposition to lockdowns and mask mandates as the preserve of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, and generally bemoans the “cyclonic forces of fascism and nihilism” besieging America. The result is an immersive and richly detailed yet contentious take on recent history that provokes more than enlightens.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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