Non-fiction books and 2021: The long road to recovery

All the top lookups of 2021 had something to do with COVID-19, and this was reflected in the themes that dominated non-fiction: virus, vaccine, globalisation, inequality

The Oxford Languages word of the year is vax; Merriam-Webster picked vaccine, noting that it has come to represent much more than just medicine. With the pandemic into its second year, it is perhaps not surprising that all the top lookups of 2021 had something to do with COVID-19. This was reflected in the themes that dominated non-fiction books — virus, vaccine, climate change, inequality, trade, globalisation, rising authoritarianism, surveillance technology and so forth.

Michael Lewis’ The Premonition: A Pandemic Story tells the story of a small group of “scientific misfits” who had obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated, and how governments accepted it theoretically but did not take it as an actual threat. Connecting the dots, Lewis explains America’s mismanagement of the pandemic, thereby holding a mirror for the rest of the world. A key local health official, who felt a “big event” was coming and that the healthcare system would be overwhelmed, said, “It’s a foreboding. A knowing that something is looming around the corner. Like how when the seasons change you can smell fall in the air right before the leaves change and the wind turns cold.” Several books dealt with other aspects of the pandemic by profiling vaccine makers (Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green) or the virus itself (Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses by Pranay Lal).

The end of the year saw the publication of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. An anthropologist and an archaeologist got together to try to “reconstruct” a sort of “grand dialogue about human history” with modern evidence. Graeber passed away last September, barely three weeks after they finished writing it. “We are projects of collective self-creation,” they say. “What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?” Both go about telling the story of not how the species fell from an idyllic state but how it came to be trapped in such “tight conceptual shackles” that reinvention has become difficult.