Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience
by Eli Saslow
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2021
240 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, a powerful and cathartic portrait of a country grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic - from fear and overwhelm to extraordinary resilience - told through voices of people from all across America.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a world-shattering event, affecting everyone in the nation. From its first ominous stirrings, renowned journalist Eli Saslow began interviewing a cross-section of Americans, capturing their experiences in real time: An exhausted and anguished EMT risking his life in New York City; a grocery store owner feeding his neighborhood for free in locked-down New Orleans; an overwhelmed coroner in Georgia; a Maryland restaurateur forced to close his family business after forty-six years; an Arizona teacher wrestling with her fears and her obligations to her students; rural citizens adamant that the whole thing is a hoax, and retail workers attacked for asking people to wear masks; patients struggling to breathe and doctors desperately trying to save them.
Through Saslow's masterful, empathetic interviewing, we are given a kaleidoscopic picture of a people dealing with the unimaginable. These deeply personal accounts make for cathartic reading, as we see Americans at their worst, and at their resilient best.
"Pulitzer winner Saslow paints in this fascinating oral history an essential portrait of how the Covid-19 pandemic 'became personal to each of us'...The breadth of Saslow's reporting astonishes, as does the directness and vulnerability of his interview subjects. This powerful, unputdownable account should be required reading." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Taken individually, the stories describe not only remarkable hardship and suffering, but also resilience, solidarity, and hope; taken as a whole, this is a vital historical document of a year-plus that none of us will ever forget. An excellent resource full of well-rendered, memorable portraits of ordinary people enduring extraordinary circumstances." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about Voices from the Pandemic was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Eli Saslow is a reporter for the Washington Post, and the author of Ten Letters, American Hunger, and Rising Out of Hatred, which won the 2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He was awarded The Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2014 and was a Pulitzer Finalist in Feature Writing in 2013, 2016 and 2017. The series on which this book is based won the 2020 George Polk award for Oral History.
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