Via The New York Times: In Italy, Coronavirus Books Rush to Publication. Excerpt:
MILAN — On Feb. 29, Paolo Giordano went to a dinner party in Rome. He didn’t shake hands or kiss anyone’s cheek, a serious breach in Italian etiquette.
A week earlier, Covid-19 cases had begun to surge in two of the country’s northern provinces. Giordano, a physicist who became one of Italy’s most prominent writers after the publication of his award-winning debut novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers, understood that the epidemic was going to grow exponentially.
"This is the last one,” he told himself. Then he began to write.
On March 26, Giordano’s new book, an essay chronicling his thoughts and angst about the coronavirus outbreak, was published in Italy. How Contagion Works is slated for release in the U.S. next week, as an audiobook by Penguin Random House and in paperback and e-book by Bloomsbury. It has been already translated in more than 20 languages and released in Britain.
Italy has been in a nationwide lockdown since March 9, and the coronavirus has already become something of a book genre.
On March 10, Roberto Burioni, a celebrity doctor and author, published Virus. The Great Challenge, an examination of how epidemics work, shaping and sometimes outsmarting civilizations. In an interview, he said the book was already in progress and scheduled to go on sale in the fall when he learned about the outbreak in China. He asked his publisher to release it as soon as possible, with two quickly written chapters on coronavirus.
“This book was needed now, not in October,” Burioni said.
Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s former finance minister, updated a book he wrote on globalization and its weaknesses in light of the pandemic. A major publishing house, Garzanti, earlier this week published an anthology of 26 quarantine short stories and essays by writers including Jhumpa Lahiri, an American novelist who also writes in Italian, and the best-selling children’s author Elisabetta Gnone.
Some expect other countries to follow. “Italy is a laboratory. Think of the singalongs from the balconies or the celebrities’ concerts on Zoom — they started here and spread to other countries,” said Andrea Minuz, a film and book critic at the newspaper Il Foglio. “We were the first to have coronavirus books and will export that, too.”
Like many Italians, Giordano is glued to the country’s 6 p.m. civil protection briefings, in which the facts and figures around infections, recoveries and deaths are shared daily. “All we can focus on during this epidemic is numbers,” he writes.
So it makes sense that math, which he sees as a tool to understand an invisible enemy, plays a key role in his new book. “Epidemics are mathematical emergencies,” he writes. Each outbreak, he explains, has at its heart a basic reproduction number, or R0 (pronounced “R-nought”), the number of susceptible individuals that are expected to contract the virus from each infected. When R0 is greater than one, and when most individuals are susceptible, we have an epidemic.
We have the power to change that number by staying home and practicing social distancing, Giordano adds. “Lowering R0 is the mathematical reason behind our self-sacrifice.”
Self-sacrifice, or the idea of putting someone else’s needs ahead of our desires, is also a central theme in the book. In times of contagion, the young and healthy must protect the old and the weak, he writes.
“What we do or don’t do is no longer just about us. This is the one thing I wish for us never to forget, even after this is over.”
