User Profile

I’m not sure what this book is about. It has been written in a haphazard way, both structurally and at the sentence level. The author seems to have a cabinet full of axes to grind. No arguments are made, there is just reportage with the author’s opinion made either explicitly by simple statement, or much more often implicitly by the images created from what is sometimes unrelated material. The core of the book is the story of the Reality Winner espionage case. Introductory portions of the book are sporadically about Julian Assange, John Lindh, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and the dark activities of our intelligence services. I suppose that these serve to set the stage for Reality Winner, or to show us the environment that she was living in. The author thinks (or perhaps feels is better) that torture is bad, that prison is bad, apparently that people come as good or bad, that medical personnel are often condescending, that our privacy has been destroyed by the internet and the NSA, and that if you are arrested and people don’t like you, then you will be abused one way or another. I wouldn’t argue that any of these are untrue, but if you worked for the government for years and have access to classified material, I find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t know that giving classified material to the internet media is a felony. The author seems to be defending Reality Winner based on statements that the Espionage Act was usually not enforced for the crime that Winner committed, that the FBI interrogated her inappropriately, that she was naive, that she was arrested at a bad time politically, that she was arrested while a fascist was the president, and that she was not a spy of any sort but a kind of whistle-blower. I guess I don’t disagree with anything in particular; I just found the whole construction to be mildly irritating and it disturbed my chi. Also, if you examine what our intelligence services did after President Bush and Congress pandered to their own fears after 9/11, you will be opening a very black box indeed.

Quammen interviewed many researchers involved in the Covid-19 pandemic during and just after the lockdown using Zoom. He has digested and presented this information for us in his usual straightforward and evenhanded way. The nature of RNA viruses, the known history of the progression of the pandemic, and various opinions on the origin of the virus are discussed. DQ occasionally goes off on a tangent, e.g. the details of Pangolin smuggling, but I found it all interesting. My edition from last year has an addendum that brings things up to date, although there hasn't been a lot of new data on the origin of the virus - the author explains why.

There is a summary of the whole book at the end of the text that was largely made by abstracting what you've just finished reading. I found it unnecessary unless you aren't going to read the book.

Chapter 37, page 145: In addition, the CDC kept advising that, when local health departments could test they should focus only on people with a travel history, or people with severe symptoms... The author should explain why the CDC made this recommendation.

Chapter 69, page 279. a potluck banquet involving roughly forty thousand families [!]