by David Kordahl
Accusatory reevaluations of the COVID-19 era are underway. Anthony Fauci’s new memoir addresses the accusations—or does it?
Oversight and Accountability
Some six weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared before the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, an investigative panel of the U.S. House of Representatives. I watched the first hour (the full session lasted roughly three-and-a half), but that was enough to get the gist. Republicans portrayed Fauci as the malevolent demiurge of the COVID-19 pandemic, with his suggestions leading to mask mandates, school closures, forced vaccinations, and possibly even the virus itself. Democrats, conversely, lamented these attempts to smear Fauci, painting them as Big Lies beginning in and persisting from the Trump era, and apologized to Fauci for the attacks on his professionalism.
Since then, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the candidacy withdrawal of President Biden have shifted the political focus in American politics away from Dr. Fauci. But for better or worse, I’ve stayed fixated. When I saw Anthony Fauci’s memoir, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, on the NEW BOOKS shelf at my local library, I knew that I would review it here.
I read On Call while I was on a long car trip with my wife and kids, during family vacation. And while I didn’t start the book any strong feelings about Fauci, I should admit a few preconceptions. For one thing, I’m instinctively suspicious of doctors. When I had appendicitis, I refused to go in until my appendix had fully burst. Also, I’m usually drawn to memoirs by people who are basically unreliable. The other memoir I read this summer—Glenn Loury’s Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative—contrasted Loury’s sexual and chemical adventuring with his “cover story” as a moral crusader.
On Call was not written for me. It’s for Fauci’s preexisting admirers, and is the opposite of a confession—more like an unapologetic self-defense. The book eventually gives readers what they want (in “Part Five: COVID”), but after 300+ pages detailing Fauci’s demonstrable successes, this part ultimately seems embarrassing, an unsatisfying conclusion to a triumphant career.
The chapters of On Call are each just a few pages, and they go by quickly. I got both the hardback and the audiobook, and alternated between them, sometimes reading, sometimes listening as I watched the red vistas scan by, the vastness of Fauci’s story complementing the vast southwestern landscapes outside. But like any visitor in unknown territory, I tried to keep alert for any unexpected movements—signs that this narrator was unreliable after all. Read more »
As the saying goes, if you believe only fascists guard borders, then you will ensure that only fascists will guard borders. The same principle applies to scientists working on nuclear weapons. If you believe that only Strangelovian warmongers work on nuclear weapons, you run the risk of ensuring that only such characters will do it.
I’m haunted by the enormity of all of that which I’ll never read. This need not be a fear related to those things that nobody can ever read, the missing works of Aeschylus and Euripides, the lost poems of Homer; or, those works that were to have been written but which the author neglected to pen, such as Milton’s Arthurian epic. Nor am I even really referring to those titles which I’m expected to have read, but which I doubt I’ll ever get around to flipping through (In Search of Lost Time, Anna Karenina, etc.), and to which my lack of guilt induces more guilt than it does the real thing. No, my anxiety is born from the physical, material, fleshy, thingness of the actual books on my shelves, and my night-stand, and stacked up on the floor of my car’s backseat or wedged next to Trader Joe’s bags and empty pop bottles in my trunk. Like any irredeemable bibliophile, my house is filled with more books than I could ever credibly hope to read before I die (even assuming a relatively long life, which I’m not).
Physicists writing books for the public have faced a longstanding challenge. Either they can write purely popular accounts that explain physics through metaphors and pop culture analogies but then risk oversimplifying key concepts, or they can get into a great deal of technical detail and risk making the book opaque to most readers without specialized training. All scientists face this challenge, but for physicists it’s particularly acute because of the mathematical nature of their field. Especially if you want to explain the two towering achievements of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, you can’t really get away from the math. It seems that physicists are stuck between a rock and a hard place: include math and, as the popular belief goes, every equation risks cutting their readership by half or, exclude math and deprive readers of a deeper understanding. The big question for a physicist who wants to communicate the great ideas of physics to a lay audience without entirely skipping the technical detail thus is, is there a middle ground?
Religion has always had an uneasy relationship with money-making. A lot of religions, at least in principle, are about charity and self-improvement. Money does not directly figure in seeking either of these goals. Yet one has to contend with the stark fact that over the last 500 years or so, Europe and the United States in particular acquired wealth and enabled a rise in people’s standard of living to an extent that was unprecedented in human history. And during the same period, while religiosity in these countries varied there is no doubt, especially in Europe, that religion played a role in people’s everyday lives whose centrality would be hard to imagine today. Could the rise of religion in first Europe and then the United States somehow be connected with the rise of money and especially the free-market system that has brought not just prosperity but freedom to so many of these nations’ citizens? Benjamin Friedman who is a professor of political economy at Harvard explores this fascinating connection in his book “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism”. The book is a masterclass on understanding the improbable links between the most secular country in the world and the most economically developed one.
Throughout history there have been prophets of doom and prophets of hope. The prophets of doom are often more visible; the prophets of hope are often more important. The Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg is a prophet of hope. For more than ten years he has been questioning the consensus associated with global warming. Lomborg is not a global warming denier but is a skeptic and realist. He does not question the basic facts of global warming or the contribution of human activity to it. He does not deny that global warming will have some bad effects. But he does question the exaggerated claims, he does question whether it’s the only problem worth addressing, he certainly questions the intense politicization of the issue that makes rational discussion hard and he is critical of the measures being proposed by world governments at the expense of better and cheaper ones. Lomborg is a skeptic who respects the other side’s arguments and tries to refute them with data.