The Nature of Things

I vowed that I would not be reading any pandemic-related or apocalyptic novels during our current public health crisis, so how exactly did I end up reading this book? I saw the review in The New York Times and the writer's name caught my attention. Lawrence Wright is a respected journalist and has written a number of well-received and occasionally award-winning nonfiction books. His most recent was a love letter to Texas called God Save Texas, another one of those books that I had always intended to read but still haven't got around to it. Wright lives in Austin. His latest book was described as "eerily prescient." It was mostly written in 2017 with the final work on it coming in 2019. But the description proved correct; reading it was a bit like reading the daily news reports of the coronavirus pandemic. Having it all put together in a coherent narrative really made the sequence of events of the actual pandemic more understandable for me.  Wright is, as I said, a jo...