2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed

In the four years since the onset of the COVID pandemic and the various events of 2020, the world still reels at the challenge of excavating the experiences and traumas that transformed life. Here, Klinenberg (social sciences, NYU; Palaces for the People) compels listeners to consider the lessons this pivotal year offers for a fractured yet community-seeking American society. The book alternates between topical chapters on issues such as trust, masks, distancing, and race with accounts of seven New Yorkers whose sufferings and subsequent actions underscore the complexities and inequities of American life. As befits its U.S. focus, Klinenberg’s account devotes considerable space to the politicization of masks, the spread of anti-Asian rhetoric and violence, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Klinenberg provides a measured reading of the prologue and the appendix, while narrator Dan John Miller resonantly and plausibly depicts a wide-ranging cast of real-life characters, including inevitable U.S. political figures. The overall effect is a mesmerizing fugue that convincingly demands reckoning with events, questions, and insufficiencies already at risk of being forgotten.