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Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience
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About Voices From The Pandemic: Americans Tell Their
Product Description 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. About the Author 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. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 “Anything good I could say about this would be a lie” Tony Sizemore, on the death of Birdie Shelton Indianapolis—March 2020 She’s dead, and I’m quarantined. That’s how the story ends. I keep going back over it in loops, trying to find a way to sweeten it, but nothing changes the facts. I wasn’t there with her at the end. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I don’t even know where her body is right now, or if the only thing that’s left is her ashes. From normal life to this hell in a week. That’s how long it took. I’d barely even heard of this damn virus until a few days ago. How am I supposed to make any sense of that? It’s loops and more loops. She transported cars for a rental company. That’s where all this must have come from. People fly in from somewhere for a meeting and fly out a few hours later. You’ve got germs from all over the world inside those cars. I didn’t like the fact that she was working so hard, sixty-nine years old and still climbing in and out of Ford Fusions all day, driving from Indianapolis to St. Louis and back with bad knees, bad hips, diabetes, and all the rest of it. Sometimes she hurt so much after work that I had to help her out of the car. I guess I should have told her to quit, but nobody told Birdie anything. She liked to drive, and we needed the money. I think she’d been feeling bad for a few days, but I don’t remember much about what happened early on. She wasn’t a complainer, and I’m not always the best at noticing. There was a cough somewhere in there. Probably a touch of a fever. But this was a few weeks back, when those things didn’t mean so much. I thought she probably had a cold, or maybe bronchitis. She would get that sometimes, lose her voice and be fine a few days later, no big deal. But then she woke me up at about four in the morning and kept pointing to her throat. She said she couldn’t sleep. Said her eyes hurt. Said it felt like somebody was pounding on top of her head. Birdie’s usually one of those who wants to rub some dirt on it and keep moving, so when she told me to take her to the emergency room, I knew it was serious. I knew she was sick. First it was a fever of 103. Then the doctors decided it was pneu
