"This visceral account of the coronavirus years blends first-person, present-tense commentary about the pandemic with the perspective of a memoir, including other epidemics James Nolan survived--first polio as a boy, then AIDS in San Francisco. The narrative is grounded in the social and political parallels drawn from writers who have explored past plagues, such as Boccaccio, Poe, Defoe, Pepys, Camus, Mann, Burroughs, and Kushner. ... Although we have scholarly histories of the yellow fever and Spanish flu epidemics that previously devastated [New Orleans], what did it feel like to actually live through those dark eras?"--