Review of reviews: Books

dential response. Pottinger, who appears frequently in the narrative, is not the most compelling of protagonists, said Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. We see him indulging “in the classic laments of conflicted Trump officials—This time I’ll resign; no, maybe next time!’” It’s hard to credit him with selfless courage.

Wright is “at his commanding best when he places the pandemic in historical context,” said Hamilton Cain in the Minneapolis

Star Tribune. His passages on the Black Plague and the 1918 Spanish flu are “narrative marvels,” and they also help us imagine how our own world could be lastingly altered by the current pandemic. For most of the U.S., the worst of the plague itself seems behind us, said Eric Allen Been in The Boston Globe. “But are we really in the clear, in a more existential, non–magical thinking sense?” Too many Americans still proudly resist being vaccinated. Too many institutions failed. Wright credits those who saved us from a worse fate, including first responders and Barney Graham, the architect of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but he chooses not to end on a hopeful note. “How could you at this point?”