Most of the books written about Covid-19 to date have been journalistic. They did the essential job of capturing the pandemic while we were living through it, but they lacked distance. Now, with the benefit of hindsight and a great deal more data, come the first of the histories. Early out of the starting blocks is Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University who has made a speciality of what he calls the “social autopsy” of disaster.
His book 2020: A Global Reckoning is the story of the year in which the United States of America became one of the deadliest places on Earth and New York recorded more illness and death from Covid than any other city on the planet. Klinenberg followed seven people across that city in that first full year of the pandemic, getting right inside their lives. He and his colleagues interviewed many others too, and they also conducted broader, macro-level research – looking, for example, at how social media shaped pandemic-related behaviour. By bridging the gaps between individual, community and population, he shows how pandemics alter society and exacerbate inequality. He follows the threads that connect the individual lived experience to the national phenomenon, to try to explain why, against all expectations, the US fared so very, very badly.
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