In this compelling collection of personal journal entries, an award-winning writer responds to the grief and fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic and other civilization-threatening dangers.
After a year of weekly entries, John Rember ended his Journal of the Plague Years: End Notes in March of 2021. But the pandemic wasn't over. This second volume, Ghost Dance, starts in September 2021. It expands the meaning of plague to include wars, population growth, undeniable climate change, increasingly corrupt and fraudulent politics, toxic social media, and a murderous tribalism.
Obviously, the times still needed a witness.
Ghost Dance is a collection of essays examining human attempts to impose grace on a world where a chaotic present has cut ties with the remembered past. Like the original ghost dancers, these writings focus on the green world that still exists beneath a human-constructed reality. Rember looks for the stories and the rituals that might, however improbably, make that world a place where humans can live.
Written at a time near the end of this country's history, the three volumes of Journal of the Plague Years offer a primary source for historians of the future, should there be any.
