**From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, and
the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous
account of Covid-19--its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and
the ongoing global fight to contain it
**
"A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even
those episodes we ... thought we knew well ... [With] lively exchanges
about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease
waves, Wright's storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive."
--The New York Times Book Review
From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming
of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence
Wright's The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative,
galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global
and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and
social ramifications of the pandemic.
Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits
lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House,
where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger's early alarm
about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly
skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with
an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South
Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman
Sachs . . . into Broadway's darkened theaters and Austin's struggling
music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science
of how the virus and vaccines function--with an eye-opening detour into
the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement.
And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical
professionals around the country who've risked their lives to fight the
virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage,
and potential.
In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and
always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through
the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the
catastrophe we thought we knew.
