Marie Brenner is a masterful storyteller, and thus she is the ideal chronicler of how one hospital coped—and failed to cope—with the Great Pandemic. By focusing on a premier hospital such as New York-Presbyterian, Brenner shows how the smartest can so easily act so dumb, and that the heroes are not always the ones in charge. As an interviewer, Brenner is sympathetic (never before had the hospital been tested like this) but not uncritical (and yet, the screwups!), so the reader is guaranteed an evocative but never sensationalized look at what life was like on the front lines during a crisis that claimed the lives not only of so many patients but also of nearly three dozen staffers who were there to save others but could not save themselves.
If you want to understand how the war in Afghanistan became such a debacle, this book is indispensable. Elliot Ackerman, who is something of a soldier-scholar (he served five tours of duty in Iraq as well as Afghanistan and worked as a White House Fellow), brilliantly explores last year’s fall of Kabul through his own experiences on the battlefield, expertly interwoven with his dramatic attempts from afar to evacuate, and thus keep from falling into the hands of the Taliban, Afghan nationals who had worked with the U.S. How much he succeeds in this endeavor gives the book its narrative tension, and along the way Ackerman reflects persuasively on who is to blame for the Taliban takeover. One of the culprits is the American people, who simply stopped caring about the war.
