What did we just live through? This is a question many Americans are asking as we emerge from both the Donald Trump presidency and the corona-virus pandemic. It is also the question at the centre of two new books. The Plague Year, by the veteran New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright – best-known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning study of another American catastrophe, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006) – chronicles the unfolding of the Covid-19 crisis in the US, which to date has killed more than 600,000 Americans. And in Last Best Hope, the Atlantic writer George Packer (formerly of the New Yorker) considers multiple crises in a more reflective mode, analysing how the US arrived at its current state, and where it might go next.
Wright’s story begins in early 2020, with a dramatic phone conversation between Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his Chinese counterpart, George Fu Gao, who says, “I think we’re too late. We’re too late.” Readers are then taken into the halls of American power as those in charge decide what to do about the pandemic – or rather, what not to do. In Wright’s telling, most fail to live up to the responsibilities of their office.
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