BELICHICK'S LAW

 "Availability is the best ability."

- Attributed to New England Patriots NFL football coach Bill Belichick

BOOK REVIEWS: "The End Of October" (fiction) and "The Plague Year" (non-fiction), by Lawrence Wright

 

BOOK REVIEWS: 

“The End of October,” by Lawrence Wright   3.5 stars 

“The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid,” by Lawrence Wright 4.5 stars   

Some people watch horror movies for fun, I’ve been reading books about pandemics… during the pandemic.  The latest is journalist Lawrence Wright’s “The End of October,” an eerily prescient novel about a mysterious (did it come from nature or a lab?), ubercontagious, superdeadly flu-like virus that takes the world in a death grip.  The book was completed in 2019, and released in April of last year- just as the coronavirus was threatening to make reality recapitulate fiction.  The greatest thing I took away from this book was a sense of relief: COVID seems like a cakewalk compared to Wright’s world ravaged by the Kongoli virus, which not only is at least a magnitude more contagious and fatal, but also leads to fast and near-complete societal and infrastructure breakdown, and causes world powers to air out their grievances through planet-spanning wars that threaten to go nuclear or biological.  I found myself regularly thinking, “Whew!  It’s not so bad! I’m glad in the real pandemic world it’s nowhere near that scary… yet.”   There are many similarities in Wright’s saga to how the real pandemic has played out, ranging from political incompetence, business profiteering, and pointless bureaucratic obstacles in governments and health agencies, to people becoming intolerant of shutdowns and letting down their guard, venturing out of hiding too quickly and reopening schools too soon, causing new, ever-worse waves of disease, and even ill-advised sanitation theatre: but I guess all of those would be quite predictable in any pandemic.  The protagonist of The End Of October is a moderately-disabled scientist (like me), a renowned globetrotting CDC epidemiologist with a lovely family in Atlanta (like some of my own kinfolk), so I found myself rooting for him: but Wright, who is a journalist by training, doesn’t quite have the novelist’s knack for character development, and some of his attempts, such as a strange detour into the Rocky Mountain wilderness, are out of place, pointless dead-ends.  (This book REALLY could sit on an archetype shelf of “novels written by journalists or professors” genre, which isn’t necessarily a dig- it just is a reflection of style.)  Yet, the science is almost completely well informed: I’d have gotten a great intro course in virology and epidemiology from this book if there had been no COVID-19.  And the action, whether it's the gory and frantic details of the virus playing out in the streets, schools and countryside, or the hero doctor caught in global conflict zones trying to get home to his family and his laboratory while searching for clues to a cure along the way, is engaging and done well for its genre.   That is, until  the ending- which is not only abrupt, trope-filled, and incomplete (actually, any satisfying ending is not really there, as if the book were pushed to market about 20% short of a conclusion once it became clear that a real pandemic was underway) and, for what ***is*** suggested to take place, is completely implausible and a total letdown, implying that a “magical solution” straight out of Google University, 7^th grade edition, was the cure the world’s biomedical experts had somehow forgotten.  An informed author like Wright should have known better.  Still, I’m glad I read this novel.

Wright shines better in more familiar territory, the non-fiction “The Plague Year,” his eye-opening journalistic account of many aspects of the first year or so of the pandemic (primarily from the USA perspective).  He takes us inside the CDC and vaccine-boffin centers, to the halls of power (and backrooms) in Washington and statehouses, including a new view of what was really going on in White House briefing rooms and coronavirus task force (if you think you “get” Dr. Deborah Birx, you may gain a completely new picture of her from this book), to poignant stories of the medical front lines and how hospitals, supply chains, and the health care system and workers were prepared… or not.  There are a few detours a little too far away from the subject at hand that detract from the flow a bit, but if it’s possible to write a kind of popular cultural anthropology or history of an event only months past, Wright has done a solid job here. 

LEMIEUX'S LAW

 "Until you get burned, you don’t know how hot the fire is."- Dr. Jacob Lemieux, lead author of an early study that revealed how transmissible COVID-19 is, in regards to the early assumptions that COVID couldn't be airborne.

Quoted in Lawrence Wright's The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid.  Extracted from a longer quote: “It was received wisdom based on how previous respiratory viruses had behaved. The global public-health infrastructure has egg on its face. There’s a component of human nature that, until you get burned, you don’t know how hot the fire is.”

My Take On The Chicken Sandwich Wars of 2021

You have to find a way to amuse yourself in the current situation, and I'm easily amused, so I've been amusing myself this summer by doing a personal investigation of the Great Chicken Sandwich War of 2021, by trying (from the drive-through, thank you) the competing "premium" chicken sandwiches.

If you haven't heard about this, just Google "chicken sandwich wars." Or look it up on Wikipedia. It's a thing.

I am not particularly a chicken sandwich aficionado- they aren't one of my favourite foods- but I've got nothing against them either, a good chicken sandwich is... good. Like most fast foods, they didn't, and won't, become a regular part of my diet- eating too much fast food too regularly is not something I recommend. Once in a while, especially out of necessity and/or convenience, it's fine, IMHO.

I tried the new "premium" chicken sandwiches (for places that had both, not the standard menu ones, the new ones that you pay extra for) at these fast-food shops: Popeyes, Church's Chicken, KFC, Burger King, McDonalds, and Wendy's. [When given an option, I chose the "classic" or "original," not the "spicy," because I find "spicy" fast food chicken to just pile on the heat for heat's sake without any nod to flavour.] My sample size is small and not significant- one sandwich, from the store nearest to my home.

My ratings:

EXCELLENT: Burger King and Popeye's. Burger King's ChKing appeared to be made from an individual fillet of chicken, unlike the processed patty suspicion of their basic chicken sandwich, was tasty, juicy, substantial and not too dense, seemed not too salty and very fresh. I'd give it the edge as the winner. Popeye's premium chicken sandwich, which started the craze, was similar, on a fresh and tasty bun, perhaps a tiny bit smaller than Burger King's, but very well done.

OKAY: McDonalds and Church's. McD's Crispy Chicken Sandwich was fine, but didn't seem to be all that much of a distinct upgrade from their regular McChicken, it seemed to be neither quite as fresh, nor as substantial as the excellent-rated ones. Church's chicken sandwich was decent, but I think likely the same one they've been serving all along with a minor tweak?

POOR: KFC and Wendy's. Both small and disgusting, both seemed stale. Chicken piece(s) was tough, overcooked, dry, and (in these cases, blissfully) small. The Colonel's gave me the feeling that someone got the idea, "can we do anything with the scraps of fried chicken that would be too embarrassing to put in someone's meal? Hey, let's slap them on a bun and call it a 'premium sandwich'..." Wendy's was so tough and dry that I couldn't eat it all.