The Plague Year

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright, 2021

Read this very quickly in a week in July 2021.

It was kind of numbing. Maybe it's too a recent experience. We are still living it and it is still impacting our lives every day. It's the second plague year and the end is not in sight. Now we might say it is the time of Delta and Epsilon is on the horizon.

It was a very well written book that held my attention through every page and was full of essential information. I knew a lot of what was going on but it was very well organized and the story flowed along in a way that put everything in context. He takes us inside the CDC and the Trump Administration and their initial botching of a response to the first signs of a pandemic, He thoughtfully and thoroughly examines the medical, social, political, and economic ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic. He also carefully documents the failures of the trump administration throughout 2020 including the lack of testing, coving up cases, misinformation, etc. It makes you wonder how mask wearing became so politicized so quickly and also how did trump actually promote quack treatment myths. We also get a view of the impact of the pandemic on the 2020 election and trump's response to losing including attempting an insurrection coup. One wonders if trump would have been reelected if there had been no pandemic for him to botch but of course anything could have brought him down.

The author also does a fine job honoring the many health care professionals who have been fighting the disease and the misinformation of trump and the right wing media. This book is about the science and an insider's view of the pandemic. He also put everything in a historical perspective. I hope the book on year two has a better ending.

I've read another book by this author... The Looming Tower: Al-Quaeda and the Road to 9/11 which was very good and I have another of his books Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief on my to read list. I've also seen that he has a novel published in early 2020 about a pandemic that I should read.