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Fisher, Thomas. The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER. One World. Mar. 2022. 272p. ISBN 9780593230671. $27. lrg. prnt. Downloadable. MEMOIR/MEDICAL

A board-certified emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago, Fisher grew up in a family of community-oriented doctors on Chicago’s South Side. He studied public health at Dartmouth and Harvard before getting his medical degree at the University of Chicago Medical School, and his professional focus has always been on the damage done to underserved and particularly Black communities owing to disparities in health care. Throughout his career, he has always maintained an emergency-room rotation, and here he offers his views on public health from the perspective of the ER in times of COVID-19.

O'Rourke, Meghan. The Night Side: Reimagining Chronic Illness. Riverhead. Mar. 2022. 336p. ISBN 9781594633799. $28. Downloadable. HEALTH & FITNESS/DISEASES

Admired poet O'Rourke, who came to the forefront with The Long Goodbye, a memoir about mourning, returns with a work that draws on her own experiences as well as 15 years of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts to examine why chronic and particularly autoimmune disease is escalating in the United States. As COVID-19 emerged, she refocused her efforts to include it in her study, which makes it especially relevant to what’s called “the Long Covid”—that is, the persistence of symptoms from fever to fatigue that have affected some survivors.

Werb, Dan. The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure. Crown. Mar. 2022. 384p. ISBN 9780593239230. $28. Downloadable. SOCIAL SCIENCE/DISEASES

COVID-19 is the third deadly coronavirus to emerge in the past two decades, following SARS and MERS, so it’s a good thing virologists like Ralph Baric began researching coronaviruses in the 1980s when they weren’t yet perceived as a much of a threat. Baric and his colleagues recognized similarities between SARS and other historical instances when coronaviruses leapt lethally from animals to humans, and they set out to develop vaccines and therapeutics that would counter the pandemic they anticipated would come. As epidemiologist Werb recounts, science, ethics, business, and politics collided just when coronavirus relief was needed the most.

Zaitchik, Alexander. Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines. Counterpoint. Mar. 2022. NAp. ISBN 9781640095069. $26. BUSINESS/PHARMACEUTICAL & BIOTECHNOLOGY

Busy freelance journalist Zaitchik, who has been reporting on COVID-19 for the New Republic, here turns his attention to the larger question of who benefits financially from the creation of lifesaving medicines. With federally funded research having facilitated most major medical breakthroughs since World War II, he asks why the legal rights to these drugs end up with international corporations, which prioritize profits over public health. With perspective dating back to the 19th century; an excerpt focusing on Bill Gates’s efforts to block open-science/pooling advocacy was the New Republic’s most accessed piece last year.

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