Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The governor of New York recounts his battle against the pandemic—and, at every step, the Trump administration. “The COVID virus is not the extent of our problem,” writes Cuomo. “COVID merely exposed underlying weaknesses.” While describing how he and his colleagues fought the virus and mountains of misguided information from the White House, the author inserts points of progressive doctrine (“State governments must reinvent the public health capacity”) and anecdotal memories of his father, also a renowned governor of New Deal leanings. Not term-limited and already in his 10th year on the job, Cuomo writes, “I intend to serve as governor of New York as long as the people will have me.” He has emerged from the pandemic as one of the few leaders who guided his state through the storm, if at great cost, while his bugaboo, Trump, emerges as inept throughout: He’s a marketing man and a cockroachlike survivor, Cuomo suggests, but not who you want to deal with a crisis that involves trusting science, data, and the government. Though structured as a diary of the plague, beginning with a “patient zero” who brought the virus not from China but Europe and extending to the near present, Cuomo’s book is really an extended assertion, unabashedly liberal, that government has a duty to act in the public good, as well as a set of prescriptions for making government better when it cannot or will not do so—as, Cuomo alleges, the Trump administration did when it threw its hands up to “abandon its basic role of managing a federal emergency.” That failure, though, allowed Cuomo to pivot as needed, and, as he observes, New York’s economy is now three-quarters open and the infection rate has been far lower than most other places after the initial onslaught. An engaging, maddening record of how to—and not to—manage a crisis. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.