This was an interesting combination of philosophy and history by Robert Zaretsky, with accounts of how famous writers and emperors handled other plagues. The section on Marcus Aurelius and his belief in Stoicism is probably the most moving and useful today, I thought. Zaratesky intersperses these with stories about his time volunteering in a nursing home during Covid.

I found this rather hard to read as an ebook because it is quite heavy-going and it really needs time and attention. My advice is to buy the paperback. Be prepared, though. It can be depressing and harrowing.

I received this ebook from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

March 2020 the world changed. Robert Zaretsky’s university went to online classes. He volunteered at a nursing home, delivering and feeding meals to the elderly. For insight and clarity, Robert Zaretsky turned to writers who had written about the plagues they had lived through.

Victories Never Last looks to the past to understand our present. Pandemics have riddled human history; the result of the growth of cities and trade which fostered the spread of disease. The numbers of lives claimed by plagues is startling–until we consider that one of of four Americans have contracted Covid-19, and without the medical advancements and health care we enjoy, for our ancestors that meant one out of four died.

Fear and disorder were byproducts of disease, breaking down social, political, and religious order. Thucydides described the Athenian plague as stripping “society to its bones, baring a world of naked self-interest and preservation” Zaretsky shares.

Marcus Aurelius responded by writing his Meditations, his personal journal to aid his adherence to his Stoic philosophy.

Montaigne was still mayor of Bordeaux when the Bubonic Plague struck, taking nearly half the population. Retiring to a life of contemplation to write his essays, he concluded that “It is not what will be or what has been that counts, but our being at this moment that we should embrace.”

In his A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe chronicled the Great Plague in 1665 London.

Albert Camus responded to the ‘brown plague’ of the Nazis; he noted that the plague in his novel has both “a social and metaphysical sense.”

Zaretsky compares Mary Wollstonecraft’s’ novel of plague The Last Man and Camus’ last, unfinished novel The First Man.

Throughout the book, Zaretsky relates his experiences in the nursing home and his own struggles with mortality. We are all frail and flawed human beings, he ends, all both the first and last of women and men.

Over these last years, many have turned to the past to help understand the present. These histories sadly show that the divisiveness which has upended our social welfare under Covid-19 is not new. These writers offer philosophies that can help us cope with our awareness of mortality.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

I think the description of this book is a little misleading. I expected Zaretsky to discuss how the writers and historians featured in this book viewed the pandemics that they witnessed and make connections to his experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I think that was the idea, but unfortunately I don't think that Zaretsky executed it the way he imagined it. In the sections examining the various writers, the author goes on tangents that have very little to do with the supposed subject of the book: pandemics throughout history. I often found myself in the middle of a passage about something entirely unrelated, asking myself what this had to do with anything.

Amongst the sections of history are excerpts of the author's own experience volunteering in a nursing home during the pandemic. I found the transitions between the history and the present day to be nearly nonexistent and, moreover, Zaretsky didn't try to relate the two at all. Even though I highlighted quite a few parallels that I saw between the accounts of pandemics past and our experiences now, Zaretsky does not point these out to the reader.

I think this book had potential and the premise was very interesting, but in the end I found it to be disorganized and lacking in structure.

As the subheader states: a work exploring reading and caregiving through the COVID-19 epidemic.

The author intersperses discussions of Thucydides, Defore, Camus, and others with his own experiences of helping to care for the elderly in a nursing home facility.

The discussions on the books are well historically informed and well nuanced. The choice of The Plague as opposed to finding something more related to H1N1 in 1918 is interesting but understandable in light of the veil of silence which covered that H1N1 outbreak.

The author makes good reflections. A history of pandemics, however, this is not.

A very well researched, poignant piece. I was touched by the author's experiences in our current crisis but his examination of Marcus Aurelius' work was particularly interesting to me.