The Plague Year

The Plague Year: America In The Time of COVID (2021) by Lawrence Wright

Genre: Exhaustively reported nonfiction book by a writer who is willing to tell the enormous story of probably the most complicated year any of us will ever live through.

Recommended For: Someone who hears so many confident, half-baked theories just through osmosis by virtue of being alive and having a smart phone or having to make conversation with people out in the world and might get comforted by a traditional collection of facts and reporting, because whatever they reveal, they are at least grounded in reality.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

There’s a decent enough chance that 2020 was a horrifically tragic year for you. For any given person you’re talking to, there is a higher likelihood that 2020 was terrible for them than any other year you could name. That’s because a little under 400,000 people died from COVID-19 in the U.S. in 2020 according to the CDC.

So, someone very close to you may have died from an illness that no one had heard of a handful of months earlier. Or you could have contracted that illness, survived and had a terrible experience with it. Or you could have lost your job and your career prospects along with it. Or you could have been stuck in a small apartment alone and found that loneliness led you right to severe depression.

That being said, at a moment where tragedy ticked up, 2020 was a year that all of us (unless you are five years old and reading this) went through. It was intensely memorable, for the fear of illness, but mostly for the drastic change in lifestyle demanded of all of us combined with a complete uncertainty regarding how things would evolve or when they would end. That’s all to say: You also might not have experienced horrible tragedy. But you still experienced 2020, and you’ll never forget it.

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At least, I would hope that we never forget it.

Both historically and on an individual level of feeling. Both are in jeopardy.

The former is jeopardy the way these things always are. History is rewritten. Facts are blurred. That’s why a book like The Plague Year is important. It’s massive and it’s fascinating. Like everything Lawrence Wright does, it’s astonishingly impressive. This is the guy who wrote the definitive books on Al-Queda and the church of Scientology, so of course he decided to write an investigative piece on the pandemic.

The book provides historical context to pandemics of the past, and it reveals every single step of government reaction to COVID-19 in 2020 with insider reporting. Almost every page is full of accounts that make you think, “How does no one know this?” You, of course, already know the answer to that. No one really wants to know or think about the government’s gross incompetence for more than a few minutes and process the death toll it created.

The cast of characters is a bit sickening to read in 2026, knowing how many of them still have central roles in our lives. The president is once again president. Someone like Kristi Noem is revealed as both evil and moronic, so it’s a bit of an enormous bummer to think about how she is now in a much greater position of power, helping to orchestrate a group of secret police that’s intended to be used to capture its own citizens. Someone like Marco Rubio, on the other hand, is portrayed as more or less capable of recognizing the difference between the worst possible decision and any other decision, so it’s arguably even more pathetic that he is going on TV every day and defending the worst possible decisions like last place in his fantasy football league had to cough up their soul.

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Not forgetting the individual feeling of 2020 is something that you’re going to have to work out for yourself. Generally, we experience something and that becomes a memory. Sometimes, that experience leads directly to other big developments in our lives, and so we tack on that context to our memories.

The memories of 2020 are so intensely unique. But the ramifications of 2020 have changed history forever in ways both unavoidable and stupid. Bad faith, power hungry people seized on the crisis to generate intense blame-based anger and sow discord (something that has happened with every crisis ever). The quarantine also leveled up social media’s influence to a degree none of us had ever really fully gone to (and most have yet to step back from). That increase in polarization and social media (and its spread of misinformation) created a tipping point.

Things weren’t good and normal in 2019, and they aren’t devoid of joy in 2026, but when you hear people say 2020 broke people, it was more than just the trauma of the illness, which, to be clear, was extremely traumatic for many people.

Eventually, The Plague Year becomes a chronological telling of 2020 from the highest level, from behind-the-scenes government decisions to overseas developments to CDC calculations. You see a race to figure things out. A race that was mostly lost, but then eventually, a second race that was won through the development of a vaccine.

But the reason I bring up that chronological timeline is that it’s impossible for anyone who lived through 2020 to not read through it and simultaneously line up these moments with their own memories of that year. The book will serve a different purpose for future generations. An important one, I hope. But I’ll never be able to untangle it from phone calls with my future wife and a number of other heightened emotional memories.

That exercise feels like an uncommon one; to read and learn about history and then line it up with key memories in your life. It’s an odd sensation, and I feel the urge to suggest that it’s healthy and important.

There is so much stacked on top of our minds now that is wholly irrelevant, and that is before we even discuss whether it is true or not. There are two things your mind can be at ease with: the truth and your own memories, even with a topic as grim as the plague.

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