R D Byron-Smith

Hunkered Down R D Byron-Smith

HUNKERED DOWN is the memoir, or what the author calls a "running history" of one of the scariest times to be alive on Earth. The deadly coronavirus pandemic of 2020 afflicted millions and killed many thousands, and would permanently change how we live our lives. With a keen eye for rich and dramatic detail, a mind for insightful opinion and the skill to force words to jump to life, the author tells a story that is in turns grim, inspiring, ugly, sad - at times unbelievable - and unforgettable. It isn't only the saga of big cities like New York where the virus from a bat, three-times more contagious than the Spanish Flu which had killed 50 million a century earlier, savaged tenement and townhome, alike. But the author takes you to these tragic scenes in lyrical prose: "No pictures on earth brought the shocking horror of the coronavirus more brightly into focus than photos taken by a drone high over pauper's cemetery on uninhabited Hart Island in the Bronx, where on the ground below workers in hazmat suits carefully lowered unpainted pine coffins into a newly dug trench half the size of a football field." The memoir provides glimpses of panicked people hoarding toilet paper to foolish college students partying on Florida's beaches thinking they were immune. It explores a sanguine panoply of people doing good, like healthcare workers putting lives on the line to save others - and paying for it with their own. Intertwined through this whirlwind chronology are travails - some funny - of the author and his wife hunkered down in the desert. If this is "running history" the author certainly caught a lot of it. It's breathless. - Pilar Publishing of California.