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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 [!]

An epic novel about a family in southern India by a well-known physician-author. The author is of Indian ancestry, went to medical school in Madras, has another degree in fine arts, and has written other best-selling books – so he has both the ability and access to the stories that make this novel so attractive. I liked the water imagery, the analogy of the river as fate, and the theme of family secrets. I appreciated all of the Medicine in it and I was reminded of several Indian physicians I have known who were more knowledgeable about classical physical examination than my American colleagues.
I have no especially important criticisms, but …
•The ending of this story is a nice example of bathos (in the sense of too much pathos).
•Although Dapsone is mentioned briefly near the end of the book, the pharmacological treatment of leprosy is otherwise ignored in this story. I understand this is necessary for the plot, but it is misleading.
•I feel obligated to say that the so-called acoustic neuroma is really a schwannoma, derived from the cell named for its discoverer, Theodor Schwann (1810 - 1882).

One might think that the story of the great fire of Ft. McMurray, Alberta in 2016 would be similar to other accounts of disaster. The reader would be both horrified and somewhat reassured by the distance of the disaster from his own home in time and space. He or she might tell themself that they wouldn’t have bought tickets on the Titanic or been unlucky enough to be in Galveston in 1900. But this account is different since the author shows us how the Ft. McMurray fire was an example of things to come and that it was secondary to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is not just a Canadian problem. I have had trouble sleeping since reading this.

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The author is fond of his similes. The book is peppered with them. Fire is like a person, a general, a flower, a lemur, a hurricane, like an oven filled with shoeboxes, etc., and fighting one is like playing lacrosse, but only as it was originally conceived. These were distracting.

The author uses some big words, which I sometimes appreciated as with anagnorisis and ignescent, but which sometimes were a distraction as with infandous. I don’t think I've ever heard or read the word infandous before [My spellchecker recommends I use infamous.]. It is not in the Random House or Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionaries. I found it in the 1928 Oxford unabridged dictionary where it is listed as obsolete with references from the 17th century. It is also listed in Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words.

I appreciated the quote from Albert Bartlett, The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. I don't know if it is our greatest shortcoming, and it was Bartlett's thing, but I think it is clear that it is an especially unfortunate feature of innumeracy. I also liked the quote from Aubrey Clayton, The problem with exponential growth is that it means most of the change is always in the recent past. I have asked critics if they remember Al Gore in a cherry-picker in front of a graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide over time. They laugh and say yes, and I inform them that since that movie was made we have produced more carbon dioxide than since we discovered fire. Not all graphed functions are linear.

Mr. Brooks has written a discussion of his approach to knowing about, listening, and talking to people. He has interest in the topic for many years both because of his own introversion and because of his career in journalism. The book is organized into general principles, communicating with people in various difficult and crisis situations, and a third part of assorted other ways to know people. The book is largely a self-help guide and contains a lot of advice that mostly seems good. At times I would agree with the author that it is wise.

What struck me negatively is what is negative in many self-help books; it is heavily referenced with ideas and quotes from famous psychologists and psychological studies. These ideas are often interesting, but many are non-scientific in that they cannot be tested, or, at least, have not been tested. So they amount to a number of ideas that Brooks has collected over the years because they please him or support his approach to things, but they often seem superficial or a small part of a much larger field of study. The studies I’m familiar with are not well-served this way, and their use reminded me of the Monty Python routine about the BBC show on how to play the flute. Blow in this end and move your fingers up and down on the stops.

There is discussion of personality types, but Freud is ignored (he is briefly mentioned as having been neurotic), perhaps because he dealt with psychopathology. Yet others with profoundly kooky ideas (e.g., Carl Jung) are quoted when needed. They are in the style of ... As a famous person once said, “Buy low and sell high”.

The author repeats the popular criticism of the Myers-Briggs personality classification as being scientifically unsound, but the alternative Five Factor Model is presented as a sound tested classification. These two systems have been shown to be highly correlated.

Finally, the author ends his book with a few pages of self-criticism, but he must realize that should he manage to become the Buddha, others would find him insufferable.