Eric Klinenberg wants you to reexamine the impact of the pandemic: ‘We are all living through the long 2020’

“This story is not over,” said Eric Klinenberg, author of “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.” “We are all living through the long 2020.” On the Shelf 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed By Eric Klinenberg Knopf Publishing Group: 464 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. His new book, “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed,” has plenty of statistics and a scope wide enough to examine the way countries around the world dealt with COVID-19, but the subtitle makes his intimate approach clear. “It’s an invitation to reconsider your own experience and the experience of people you love through their lens, which can help all of us make sense of what happened.” His subjects include Sophia Zayas, a Puerto Rican living in the Bronx who worked for Gov. “People there know the history of the U.S. experimenting on people of color and treating them badly,” Klinenberg says, noting that while Zayas eventually came around on vaccines, “we can’t paper over that.” At the other end of the city and the political spectrum is bar owner Daniel Presti, a Staten Island Republican who became a hero to the far right when he refused to comply with restaurant closure orders and mask mandates.