The New Yorker staff writer and author of the novel The End of October unpacks the Covid-19 pandemic, from the outbreak in China to the vaccine rollout, taking readers inside the CDC, the White House and other halls of power where those in charge of public health struggled to deal with the virus.
... incredibly-crafted ... Wright doesn’t wrap up with solace or closure in The Plague Year. How could you at this point? What he does provide is a well-wrought map covering the institutions and politicians that failed America during this stretch of the pandemic. But Wright crucially highlights those that also saved us — the first responders and the reasonable.
Wright...has performed a virtuoso feat and given us a book of panoramic breadth ... he ranges from science to politics to economics to culture with a commanding scrutiny, managing to surprise us about even those episodes we have only recently lived through and thought we knew well ... Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive ... Wright has laid a foundation for memorializing a terrible disaster, creating space for countless others like Iris’s daughter to keep asking what happened, and to grieve.