The Book Club: Lawrence Wright on why Covid was a catastrophe for America

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2021

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

In this week's Book Club podcast, Sam Leith's guest is one of America's foremost magazine journalists, the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright. His new book is The Plague Year: America In The Time of Covid. He tells Sam what a book brings to recent history that week-to-week journalism can't, about the extraordinary happenstance that put him in contact with one of the unsung heroes of the vaccine race, and the three reasons Covid was such a catastrophe for the US.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:28.0	Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:34.0	And this week I'm joined by the New Yorker journalist Lawrence Wright, who's already well known for
0:39.9	his book, The Looming Tower on the History of Al-Qaeda and the run-up to 9-11. His new book is another
0:45.5	hot-off-the-press report on the state of America. It's called the Plague Year, America in the
0:51.7	time of COVID. Lawrence, welcome. Thank you, Sam. I want to start by asking you
0:56.3	about the peculiar difficulties as a reporter in approaching a book like this, because you're
1:01.3	competing in some ways, aren't you, with that much more nimble thing of daily journalism and
1:06.6	weekly journalism? How do you write a book that is so much about current events, about a
1:11.3	continually unfolding situation, and find a way of bringing something new? Well, you know, it was
1:16.5	a challenge. You're right about that. But when my editor asked me to write a big piece for the New
1:22.5	Yorker, I thought about how it had touched every aspect of our lives, the economy, our health, race,
1:30.8	class.
1:31.4	You couldn't name an aspect of American life that hadn't been altered in some way by this.
1:38.0	And so I thought the best way of going about it would be to look at different institutions
1:44.1	that embody those aspects of our society,
1:46.7	like Wall Street, the White House, and so on, and find emblematic characters inside them. I couldn't
1:54.1	deal with the fact, the onslaught of daily journalism. But on the other hand, what was really intriguing
1:59.8	to me is how much daily journalism missed the story. You know the other hand, what was really intriguing to me is how much daily journalism
2:02.1	missed the story. You know, for instance, development of the vaccines. You know, the story in the
2:09.2	daily press was all about MRNA, which is a delivery mechanism for a vaccine. It's not the
2:16.2	vaccine, but it was represented as being the vaccine.
	...

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