Unprepared

Prizewinning author and reporter: Timothy Egan's work has been awarded the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, and more, and he writes currently as a columnist for The New York Times. He is the perfect advocate and promoter for a work of monumental history.Highly compelling read and innovative reading experience, perhaps the more so because we have all lived it and can personally recall many of its parts and moments as we experienced them. Unprepared is a tool to access the world we are living in at this time and down the road, when the days of shelter in place merge into one large blur of uncertainty.Unique approach to the topic: countless articles and books to come are making sense of COVID-19's influence over our lives during, and in the wake of, the global catastrophe. Unlike those books, which will prioritize the moment and the virus in political or medical terms, Unprepared bottles up the social and cultural experience of the pandemic and delivers it for readers to engage directly with the emotions and widespread confusion that define the experience.Adoption potential: Unprepared will be a unique historical document, a primary source resource for policy makers, community taskforces, and in educational and scholarly settings.Jon Sternfeld is a former editor and the co-author of Crisis Point, with Sen. Tom Daschle and Sen. Trent Lott; A Stone of Hope, with Jim St. Germain; and A Forever Family with Rob Scheer, among other non-fiction books. He lives in New York. Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of nine books, most recently The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for nonfiction and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Washington State Book Award winner, and a Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Book. He writes a weekly opinion column for The New York Times and lives in Seattle."An essential volume." -E. J. Dionne, Jr. * "A damning portrait" -Publishers Weekly With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner Timothy Egan, the riveting, eye-opening first-draft history of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unprepared is the sweeping history of the Covid-19 pandemic-a raw, primary-source accounting of the epoch-­defining event: a virus that first appeared in China in late 2019 and spread rapidly across the globe, killing hundreds of thousands, devastating economies, and changing the modern world forever. A day-by-day chronicle of the response to Covid-19 as it attacked, Unprepared gathers a range of public statements from President Trump and his administration, elected officials such as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, leading journalists and scientists, and organizations from National Nurses United to the United Food and Commercial Workers union. A haunting portrait of the world scrambling for answers while the number of cases rose alongside the death toll, the book reveals not only our strengths as a people, but also the fault lines and dysfunction that plague our nation in the new millennium. Unprepared is an illuminating artifact for today and for future generations, an astonishing document of history being made, and a multifaceted narrative that drops the reader directly into the real-time experience of confusion, drama, and fear that defines the outbreak of Covid-19.With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner Timothy Egan, the riveting, eye-opening first-draft history of the Covid-19 pandemic.A riveting chronicle of confusion, alarm, deception and incompetence. Yet this day-by-day account also reminds us of the many moments of heroism and bravery in the face of a pandemic . . . Unprepared will call forth flashes of recognition, and like many good detective stories, it keeps you asking, 'Why didn't they see what was coming?'. An essential volume.Unprepared is the way to step away from the everyday's-the-same pandemic stupor to see how prescient some were of what was to come and how those warnings were squandered. There are a few wise ones in this story, too many cowards and fools and then the rest of us, who have gradually, willingly fostered a political system that failed.Never have our leaders' words been used to such poignant (and devastating) effect. Powerful and damning.A damning portrait . . . well-conceived and solidly executed, this is a vital record of an ongoing American crisis.