The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
(Knopf, $28)
“We aren’t the people we thought we were,” said Michael King in The Austin Chronicle. Lawrence Wright’s masterful new book about the first year or so of the Covid-19 pandemic shows readers as much, and what that tells us about our capacity to handle future crises is “not reassuring.” Wright, a veteran New Yorker writer, is “an extraordinary reporter,” and “though little in the book will be surprising for anyone who has closely followed the news, having it all recounted in one place will make the book indispensable as a coronavirus compendium.” Wright details failures inside both China and the CDC before he takes President Trump fully to task. “But The Plague Year is by no means a polemic.” It doesn’t blame Trump for the lives needlessly lost; it blames the America that elected him.
“This is not a book of heroes,” said Andrew Anthony in TheGuardian.com. Wright reminds us that China was slow to warn the world, that the compromised World Health Organization accepted China’s word that no contagious disease was spreading, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control muffed early testing. In the end, “very few government figures emerge with their reputations enhanced.” But Wright proves fairly sympathetic to Deborah Birx, the former White House coronavirus response coordinator, and to Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger. Both Trump administration officials argued for a more constructive presi