Reading in 2021

 

I am not a fast reader but had time this year to read 32 books.  After completing each book, I write a short review of each and give it a score ranging from minus, neutral, +, ++.   Obviously, there are a few with a minus score get discarded before page 50. 

Here are my ++ books for 2021.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier; The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson; Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden by John Steinbeck; Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land, by William Kent Krueger, The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky (my favorite is The Peasant Marey); The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey and Destiny of the Republic, by Candice Millard; Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman; The Mapmaker's Wife, by Robert Whitiker; and The Premonition, by Michael Lewis 

Just a bit about this last one.  For a non-fiction book, this reads like a page turning detective story. Lewis is quite the storyteller!  He recounts the years leading up to the current pandemic starting in the George W. Bush administration when some very smart people were gathered into a team to develop the national pandemic response plan.  Bush had read Berry's book on the 1918 pandemic and saw the urgency of planning for the next one. The book is a fascinating story of behind the scenes medical, public health and computer modeling visionaries who continued to work on preventing the worst-case scenarios of what was surely coming - the next pandemic. One of the main characters, Cherity Dean, in the California Public Health Department, had a premonition of it's coming even before it arrived in the US.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic recommendations and models from these problem solvers met with a wall of resistance and ignorance from the establishment, including the CDC, the Whitehouse and other politicians who didn't have the courage to make hard decisions quickly to avert the coming damage.  The CDC fumbled the ball in the beginning by not coming out with a testing program and tool for testing. We have all heard about how the Trump administration zeroed out the budget for the pandemic planning team, and (thanks to John Bolton) that team was all fired.  

Turns out that the US was not the country best prepared for a pandemic.  Lewis refers to Carter Mecher, one of these behind-the-scenes individuals as redneck epidemiologist and says this is a book about "superheroes where the superheroes don't win the war".

As we know, there is not a happy ending to this story.  But it is fascinating and encouraging to know that there are some very bright people out there working on solutions who are doing it for reasons other than fame and money.  Probably many of them in state and local public health departments who just need good direction and a cohesive national health policy to do their jobs. 

This story shows the correlation between politics and pandemics and how science is often not allowed to do what is required.