What do you think?
Rate this book
A Deeper Sickness: Journal of America in the Pandemic Year
A harrowing chronicle by two leading historians, capturing in real time the events of a year marked by multiple devastations.
When we look back at the year 2020, how can we describe what really happened? In A Deeper Sickness, award-winning historians Margaret Peacock and Erik Peterson set out to preserve what they call the “focused confusion”, and to probe deeper into what they consider the Four Pandemics that converged around the 12 astonishing months of 2020:
· Disease
· Disinformation
· Poverty
· Violence
Drs. Peacock and Peterson use their interdisciplinary expertise to extend their analysis beyond the viral science, and instead into the social, political, and historical dimensions of this crisis. They consulted with dozens of experts and witnesses from a wide range of fields – from leading epidemiologists and health care workers to leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, district attorneys, political scientists, philosophers, and more. Their journey revealed a sick country that believed it was well, a violent nation that believed it was peaceful; one that mistook poverty for prosperity and accountability for rebellion.
Organized into the journal-entries along with dozens of archival images, A Deeper Sickness will help readers sift through the chaos and misinformation that characterized those frantic days. It is both an unflinching indictment of a nation that is still reeling and a testament to the power of human resilience and collective memory.
Readers can share their story and become a contributing author by visiting an interactive digital museum, where the authors have preserved dozens of more stories and interviews.
When we look back at the year 2020, how can we describe what really happened? In A Deeper Sickness, award-winning historians Margaret Peacock and Erik Peterson set out to preserve what they call the “focused confusion”, and to probe deeper into what they consider the Four Pandemics that converged around the 12 astonishing months of 2020:
· Disease
· Disinformation
· Poverty
· Violence
Drs. Peacock and Peterson use their interdisciplinary expertise to extend their analysis beyond the viral science, and instead into the social, political, and historical dimensions of this crisis. They consulted with dozens of experts and witnesses from a wide range of fields – from leading epidemiologists and health care workers to leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, district attorneys, political scientists, philosophers, and more. Their journey revealed a sick country that believed it was well, a violent nation that believed it was peaceful; one that mistook poverty for prosperity and accountability for rebellion.
Organized into the journal-entries along with dozens of archival images, A Deeper Sickness will help readers sift through the chaos and misinformation that characterized those frantic days. It is both an unflinching indictment of a nation that is still reeling and a testament to the power of human resilience and collective memory.
Readers can share their story and become a contributing author by visiting an interactive digital museum, where the authors have preserved dozens of more stories and interviews.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 11, 2022
4 people are currently reading
1662 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 16, 2023
An amazing reliving of 2020. It is hard to believe so much happened. Rather like a year long train wreck.
June 9, 2022
Reading this book was like re-living 2020, it reminded me of many many things, some mentioned in this book, some not. I'm glad they didn't try to cover too many things (otherwise, the book would have been much longer), but I'll visit the site (deepersickness.com). It's my hope that the experience of 2020 would serve a starting point for something better, a turning point in the authors' words. But unfortunately, I'm not optimistic.
February 8, 2023
Outstanding account of the terrible crises in our nation in 2020: racism, Trumpist fascism culminating in Jan 6th 2021, gutting of public health infrastructure for decades prior, and THEN, amidst it all, the COVID pandemic and the criminal mismanagement of it by the Trump "Drink Bleach" administration. Gripping, and literally, ripped from the headlines...
3 Feb. 2020, from A Deeper Sickness by Erik Peterson and Margaret Peacock: “…ophthalmologist Li Wenliang died of the virus after trying to warn people that something terrible was happening. The Chinese government censored him in late 2019. Then, after he signed an official apology for ‘rumormongering,’ he contracted the virus….The outpouring of emotion from the Chinese people is overwhelming. One Weibo post says, ‘The only thing is not to forget.’
That’s right, of course. ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,’ penned Czech writer Milan Kundera fifty years ago. The tragedy of Dr. Li reminds us that under the weight of a powerful and callous government, one can be made to apologize for one’s own death. But one cannot be forced to forget. When the Chinese people agree not to forget Dr. Li, they refuse to relinquish to the regime the power that real history confers. They fight quietly to remember things as they were, as opposed to remembering a past that the powerful construct for them.”
3 Feb. 2020, from A Deeper Sickness by Erik Peterson and Margaret Peacock: “…ophthalmologist Li Wenliang died of the virus after trying to warn people that something terrible was happening. The Chinese government censored him in late 2019. Then, after he signed an official apology for ‘rumormongering,’ he contracted the virus….The outpouring of emotion from the Chinese people is overwhelming. One Weibo post says, ‘The only thing is not to forget.’
That’s right, of course. ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,’ penned Czech writer Milan Kundera fifty years ago. The tragedy of Dr. Li reminds us that under the weight of a powerful and callous government, one can be made to apologize for one’s own death. But one cannot be forced to forget. When the Chinese people agree not to forget Dr. Li, they refuse to relinquish to the regime the power that real history confers. They fight quietly to remember things as they were, as opposed to remembering a past that the powerful construct for them.”
December 10, 2022
The content of the book rates four stars, the narrator and the production value of the audiobook rate less than one star. I was highly annoyed at the narrator mispronouncing words, and the production value of the recording is absolute shit. When I'm walking around my yard yelling out words that she's mispronouncing, that's not good for me or my neighbors. I listened to a podcast with Susan Erickson and she talked about how a good narrator needs to be able to maintain a consistent sound to their voice throughout the whole day -- this narrator's voice was so wildly inconsistent that I thought there were at least two people doing the reading! Is that a man reading now, was it a woman? And there are SO! MANY! "corrections" made to the recording that are super jarring. There would be a little bit of a flow happening with her voice and then there would be an inserted section where she came back to correct something and her tone/volume/sound would be even more off. Awful.
Good content, shitty presentation. This has to be one of the worst audiobook experiences I've ever had. There are narrators whose voices I just don't like and I can avoid them, but the production of this audiobook was shocking.
Good content, shitty presentation. This has to be one of the worst audiobook experiences I've ever had. There are narrators whose voices I just don't like and I can avoid them, but the production of this audiobook was shocking.
August 13, 2022
I found this book to be very interesting and kind of traumatic too. It brought me right back to 2020 when our world changed so drastically. It was fascinating to see the changes happen day by day. It wasn’t new news but was well written and unbiased.
March 9, 2022
It was a good read.
March 17, 2023
DNF,
I’m sure this book is good, but I got about 1/3 of the way through it and realized how much I didn’t want to relive 2020.
I’m sure this book is good, but I got about 1/3 of the way through it and realized how much I didn’t want to relive 2020.
September 28, 2025
DNF… read 33% and it appeared accurate until June 1, 2020 when the author wrote a propaganda lie and therefore the book’s accuracy came into question and I refused to waste anymore time on the book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews