'An essential volume' E. J. Dionne, Jr.

With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner Timothy Egan, the riveting, eye-opening first-draft history of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unprepared is the sweeping history of the Covid-19 pandemic-a raw, primary-source accounting of the epoch-­defining event: a virus that first appeared in China in late 2019 and spread rapidly across the globe, killing hundreds of thousands, devastating economies, and changing the modern world forever. A day-by-day chronicle of the response to Covid-19 as it attacked, Unprepared gathers a range of public statements from President Trump and his administration, elected officials such as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, leading journalists and scientists, and organizations from National Nurses United to the United Food and Commercial Workers union. A haunting portrait of the world scrambling for answers while the number of cases rose alongside the death toll, the book reveals not only our strengths as a people, but also the fault lines and dysfunction that plague our nation in the new millennium.

Unprepared is an illuminating artifact for today and for future generations, an astonishing document of history being made, and a multifaceted narrative that drops the reader directly into the real-time experience of confusion, drama, and fear that defines the outbreak of Covid-19.

Jon Sternfeld is a former editor and the co-author of Crisis Point, A Stone of Hope and A Forever Family, among others. He lives in New York.

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of nine books, most recently The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for nonfiction and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Washington State Book Award winner, and a Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Book. He writes a weekly opinion column for The New York Times and lives in Seattle.