A Covid-19 reference as comprehensive as it is devastating.
Gruner presents an overview of the Covid-19 pandemic in America that also looks at global, historical, and political complexities to add context to the crisis.
Even before the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019, American leaders like presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had anticipated the possibility of a global outbreak—their preparations and warnings were largely disregarded by the Trump administration, per the author. Yet despite Trump’s fumbling of the public messaging about the pandemic, his administration’s Operation Warp Speed achieved the extraordinary by fast-tracking Covid-19 vaccines in just seven months. (“By reducing the drug makers’ financial risk, Warp Speed greatly accelerated the development of the COVID vaccines.”) Gruner maintains a consistently nonpartisan approach, highlighting the tyrannical overreach of some Republican governors during lockdowns while noting then–Vice President Joe Biden’s early vaccine skepticism during the 2020 election. The author discusses similar outbreaks in America’s past, like the 1918 Spanish Flu and the 1957 Asian Flu, to explore the government’s role in managing public health crises in a nation that holds personal freedom (inconsistently, perhaps) as sacrosanct. Writing with future historians in mind, Gruner systematically examines the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on the United States in 10 chapters that incorporate over 80 charts, tables, and graphs. Red and blue states’ differing strategies regarding lockdowns and reopenings serve as case studies, offering hard data that tracks deaths both caused by and related to the virus as well as its economic and educational impact. To call the book thorough would be an understatement; over 100 pages of appendices and citations include state and country demographics, term definitions, acronyms, and a robust index to supplement an already well-structured and succinct resource. The author’s approach is dispassionate, allowing the massive death toll and preventable mistakes to speak for themselves. Responsibility is placed on political leaders, media, entertainment figures, and individual citizens without Gruner ever taking an accusatory tone; the stark and undeniable numbers do the job.
A Covid-19 reference as comprehensive as it is devastating.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781737823155
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Libratum Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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