About this Book

"Foreshadowing a subsequent exodus, Luke O'Neil and his wife moved from the city to the suburbs just prior to the lockdown. Isolated not only by a virus but also by the alienation of a neighborhood where social distancing meant more than just geographical separation, O'Neil faced trials on numerous fronts: How to avoid potentially lethal clashes with new Republican neighbors? How to continue a working life as one America's most electric, hard-hitting commentators without the opportunity of face-to-face reporting? How to maintain his own sanity, always a frail ship, while the world as we knew it disintegrated? These pages chronicle that struggle. In turns furious, funny and philosophical they show a writer leavening his own feelings of helplessness by conversing with others experiencing the same discomfort - a postal worker, grocery store clerk, hotel receptionist, and people with kids stuck at home or Trump supporting family members. He talks, too, with a demonstrator whose eye was blinded by a police projectile on a Black Lives Matter protest. Shifting back and forth across a summer lost to a virus and an economic system already deeply unjust and now profoundly dysfunctional, the sense of desperation that laces together O'Neil's taut rendering serves, paradoxically, to reassure: In battling to overcome the particular obstacles they face in the pandemic, working class people are in this together"--