In her brilliant and moving new book “The Desperate Hours,” author and journalist @MarieBrenner shares how healthcare workers came together in their devotion to duty, their families, each other, and the city they love. A real page-turner!
Arianna Huffington, @ariannahuff
In the spring of 2020, NY was one of the first to feel the full force of Covid-19 in the US. This great book by @MarieBrenner shares some incredible stories and lessons from one hospital’s battle to not only save patients, but the city as well.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, @drsanjaygupta
The Book
The Desperate Hours
One Hospital's Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic's Front Lines
AWARD-WINNING VANITY FAIR WRITER Marie Brenner shares a remarkable depiction of New York—a city in crisis—based on new, behind-the-scenes reporting that captures the resilience, peril, and compassion of the early days of the Covid pandemic.
“Fascinating and harrowing. . . . Brenner draws sharp, sympathetic profiles . . . and vividly captures moments of heartbreak and celebration.”
COVID’s Ground Zero, Spring 2020: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Traumatized New York
BOOK EXCERPT
There were a lot of things Dr. Lindsay Lief, head of 5 South, was great at, but always following the rules was not one of them.
Lief was the beloved director of the medical intensive care unit on 5 South, one of six ICUs at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, a hospital system that is considered the Emerald City of medical care in the New York metropolitan area. She brilliantly oversaw a team of 11 critical-care physicians (the attendings) and dozens of highly trained nurses, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, X-ray techs, and housekeepers tasked to help heal the sickest of the sick, to conjure miracles amid the breakdown of the body’s systems. It was a unit that would be knocked down again and again and again during the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic. That it was still standing was a miracle—and while Lief never told anyone about it, one reason for that may have had to do with a six-year-old and his forbidden wish for a slice of pizza.
MSNBC Interview
Investigative journalist, Marie Brenner, joins MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss “The Desperate Hours”
MORE REVIEWS for ‘the desperate hours’
“Urgent. . . . Brenner creates a tense, stirring picture of the impact of Covid-19 on New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s campuses. . . . [Her] probing investigation includes animated profiles of a large cast of characters, creating a palpable sense of trauma, pain, and vulnerability in what one cardiologist characterized as nothing less than war.”
“All the drama of E.R., with fast-paced narrative writing and deep first-hand reporting. This is a richly populated story that is as moving as it is authoritative.”