Pandemic accounts cover the personal, the political

I find myself haunted by a scene New Yorker journalist Lawrence Wright brings alive in his nuanced and sensitively reported study, “The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID.” It’s the moment where immunologist Barney Graham gets a call telling him that, despite his own grave doubts, a vaccine against COVID19 based on his own groundbreaking work was turning out to be successful.

“It’s working,” Graham tells his wife, then cannot speak anymore and retreats to his study. “He sat at his desk and wept,” Wright writes. “His family gathered around him. He hadn’t cried that hard since his father died.”

If you received either the Pfizer vaccine, as my wife and I did, or the Moderna vaccine, you can thank Graham’s pioneering work in designing a structurebased vaccine, work that Wright has described in vivid, understandable detail earlier in the book.

These are the moments that resonate in books about the pandemic year, personal stories that connect with the larger narrative of what we all lived through together. It is hard not to gasp, for example, when Amanda Kloots describes the first moments after doctors concluded that her husband, Nick Cordero, was suffering from COVID19, and a doctor tells her, “We’d like to start hydroxychloroquine.”

No! Not that! The brief moment of vicarious panic is a measure of how invested the reader feels emotionally by this early stage in “Live Your Life: My Story of Loving and Losing Nick Cordero,” written with the help of Kloots’ sister, Amanda.

Kloots’ narrative has an engaging, immediate quality, emotionally intimate and at times goodnaturedly unpolished in the manner of socialmedia posts. The approach feels right in telling the story of this 6foot5 man, young and strong and vital, a Broadway star, who with dizzying speed goes from sudden, repeated naps at home to intubation in a Los Angeles intensivecare unit. “My phone rang at 4 in the morning,” writes Kloots, who was at home with their newborn baby, Elvis.

“Honey, they want to put me on a ventilator,” her husband tells her.

“I was in a daze, caught off guard, and I couldn’t find the words even to respond,” she writes.

Her husband tells her: “They have to put me in a medically induced coma so my body can rest. It should only be a few days, but I won’t be able to talk to you anymore after this call. I’m scared.”

“I’m scared, too, honey,” she answers, in a whisper, trying not to wake the baby.

That latenight call was the last time she ever heard Nick’s voice. She tells her story with an engaging mix of the profound and the everyday, the way real grief is lived, and the result is a brave, emotionally raw portrait of one set of lives during the pandemic that will resonate widely with readers looking, belatedly, to process all that we could not at the time.

We have a lot of mourning to do, individually and as a society, and I for one have the sense that we’re only getting started with that daunting task. Nearly 20 years ago, I reviewed a group of 9/11 books for The Chronicle: “We all did a lot of forgetting … turning away from that inner pain and bewilderment so many of us felt,” I wrote at the time. “Now it’s time to turn back. We all have to decide how — and what — we want to remember.”

That’s why books with personal stories are more likely to resonate at this point than hightorque analytic books like Benjamin Bratton’s “The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a PostPandemic World.” Bratton is clearly a fascinating fellow. He holds a doctorate in sociology of technology from UC Santa Barbara and has all manner of impeccable credentials from European think tanks to Yahoo study groups, but reading his book I kept wanting to drag him into a dive bar and ask him to buy Pabst pitchers for the house and read aloud from his work.

The postpandemic reckoning, Bratton writes, “should be a death blow to the reactionary forms of political populism of recent years, which were built on simple, cathartic stories of resentment and recrimination. But will that be the case? It is not remotely certain.” No, it is not. Another pitcher of Pabst!

“The pandemic (and climate change and many other things besides) makes clear that the present anarchic state of geopolitics must give way to forms of governance that are equitable, effective, rational and therefore realist,” Bratton continues. “If nothing else, this book is a call for a new realist form of planetary politics as an antidote to the populist incoherency of recent years that is clearly not up to the task.”

Wright, in contrast, focuses on closeups of foreground figures that can deepen our understanding of what we have lived through. He even humanizes figures like the notorious Deborah Birx, widely vilified on social media in her time as White House coronavirus response coordinator. Birx’s grandmother, we learn, passed the flu on to her own mother in 1918, and watched her die, feeling responsible.

“My grandmother lived with that for 88 years,” Birx tells Wright.

Early on, Wright introduces

By Lawrence Wright (Knopf; 336 pages; $28)

‘Live Your Life: My Story of Loving and Losing Nick Cordero’

By Amanda Kloots (with Anna Kloots)

(Harper; 336 pages; $27.99)

‘The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World’

By Benjamin Bratton (Verso Books; 176 pages; $19.95)

Trump official Matthew Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter fluent in Mandarin. “His eyebrows are a brighter blond, lending him the quality of appearing extra awake,” Wright writes. He keeps thinking he’ll leave the administration, but stays four years, until the afternoon of the Jan. 6 insurrection, when he finally made his exit.

“He was always weighed down by the burdens of the office, knowing the peril that the country was facing more intimately than nearly everyone, knowing every minute of his service how much was at stake, and how slender was the line between order and chaos — as the Capitol police were discovering at that very moment,” Wright writes.

That line between order and chaos remains slender. I’m thankful that wise guides like Wright and brave eyewitnesses like Kloots can help us to unlock some of our barred memories, so we can learn again to tune into more than the crisis — or outrage — of the moment.

Steve Kettmann is a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter and the author and coauthor of 10 books. He’s codirector of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods writers’ retreat center near Santa Cruz.

questions that you wish people would ask.

Lamott: Here is your closing answer, and you can come up with a question: My son, Sam, has “we never give up” tattooed on his forearm. I always dreamed of finding a soulmate and partner who was easy to be with, someone that I felt like I could talk to the rest of my life. By the time I met Neal, I had become somebody who was her own priority. When I met Neal and wanted to be best friends with him, it was paradoxically in that equation that I became somebody else’s priority.

Allen: That’s so sweet. I’m more a chameleon. When I met Annie, and she was kind all the time, I thought: You mean, I can be kind all the time? That’s cool! My chameleon said, let’s be kind. Lamott: Never give up.

‘The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID’