The Plague Year

America in the Time of Covid

By: Lawrence Wright

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

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.

Could’ve been a classic

The Plague Year is just that, the story of covid year one. It has an unorthodox pattern of tracking the virus. The book is almost like snapshots of the outbreak. You follow people at the CDC, people in the government, frontline medical workers and more. Although I did enjoy the book, I thought that with more time maybe the writer could’ve deepened the narrative structure. Because it feels like a glimpse of covid more than the full picture. But Lawrence Wright is a great writer!

Plague of poor leadership

Sometimes a bit too preachy on racial and wealth disparities. I most appreciated knowing the time lines of what we knew and who knew what about the coronavirus.

Great overview of the pandemic year!

I loved Wright’s End of October, and was amused that he went from fiction to fact. I also liked that he laid blame or criticism where he thought it was deserved, which included the CDC and Fauci (while still praising). Also he gave credit to those who deserved it, which included Birx, and made me rethink my criticism of her. I highly recommend this book, and thought it was very thorough!

Familiar events pulled together very well!

There were a few events that I didn’t know happened but the best part of this book is the way it is pulled together. Excellent book!

Amazing

This book flew by. The author does a tremendous job of keeping the reader engaged and explaining medical concepts in an understandable way.