"Song took a shallow, labored breath. He worried that a deepening distrust of doctors was undermining end-of-life discussions: "It's impossible when the patient or the patient's family is thinking at every turn, Oh, is the doctor saying there's nothing we can do because that's really the case or because he doesn't think he'll earn enough to be worth his effort?" Song adjusted his nasal tube. "Everyone should know what's coming. When that day comes, we have to know the difference between giving up and letting go."
2021, as I'm sure everyone still living knows, was a difficult year for most people. In 2023 many of us are looking at COVID more retrospectively, but back in 2021 COVID was an omnipresent fact of life, informing both trends in journalism and the shape our daily lives took. 2021 wasn't a good year for anyone who read the news, enjoyed traveling, or who worried aver the prospect of continued, unhindered breathing.
So of course COVID is a major theme in this book. It isn't the subject of every article, but it's almost always there, lurking in the background, if not placed front and center. And in the pages where COVID is absent there's climate change, a subject which is often assessed and reassessed in connection with COVID, so it should come as no surprise that The Best American Science and Nature Writing: 2021 more often than not makes for depressing reading.
This book is divided into three sections: "Contagion," "Connections" and "Consequences." I'm sure you can guess what the articles in "Contagion" are about. "Connections" and "Consequences" are where the articles offered and the subjects they highlight are more diverse, and where COVID forms more of a backdrop to a wider variety of topics.
The first section, "Contagion," was the hardest for me to get through. Part of my difficulty was the fact that I, like many of you, have been emotionally exhausted by discussions of emergency rooms, dwindling resources and the ways in which viruses are transmitted. Part of my difficulty also lies with the fact that a couple of articles in this section are just badly written, poorly conceived exercises in journalism, "It's Not Too Late To Save Black Lives" and "The Soft Butch That Couldn't" being the word offenders in this regard. But then again we were all quietly (or not so quietly) panicking in 2021, so I can't blame the editor too much for the inclusion of these pieces.
The second and third sections of this book are better, even if Emily Raboteau's "This Is How We Live Now" is one of the most hysterical, overwrought, misleading bits of "journalism" I've ever come across. It's less an essay than a guide to the author's pretentious friends. COVID? Climate change? I'd take both over the annoying urban types that populate this tired plea for relevance. Talk about preaching to a very particular choir.
I can't say that I found much common ground with the climate change articles in this book. They discuss ecosystems, sure, but I wasn't seeing much understanding of how ecosystems actually work. What's that, you say, we can't just pick and choose the aspects of nature we like, managing them in perpetuity? No we can't, and a more humble understanding of our place in nature might be in order. At the end of each day it's not about the end of the world; it's not about saving the planet, it's about saving ourselves, and living in a way that puts less pressure on the environments we inhabit.
The last two articles in this collection, "The Friendship and Love Hospital" and "The Last Children of Down Syndrome," are far and away the best articles in this book. The former discusses hospice care in China, and it's one of the most masterfully written articles I've come across in a long time. The latter article explores the effect of prenatal DNA testing on expectant mothers, and reveals a complex web of choices with regard to who is born, who isn't, and how our understanding of genetics plays into public policy.
Overall I think that this collection is worth reading, but you could probably skip over the first section. Those articles were written in the thick of things, and we've all been there and had those arguments with friends and family already.
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