As the pandemic raged, Kathy Gilsinan found 'The Helpers'
The title of Kathy Gilsinan’s new book comes from an oft-quoted suggestion by Fred Rogers — when you see scary things on the news, you can feel better by looking for “the helpers.” Said the man known to generations of children as Mr. Rogers,“You will always find people who are helping.”
Surveying America’s two-year battle with COVID-19, many of us see only mistake after mistake. A contributing writer at the Atlantic who lives in St. Louis, Gilsinan doesn’t excuse those errors.
But her focus in “The Helpers: Profiles from the Front Lines of the Pandemic” is on the ordinary people who did extraordinary things. The 35-year-old public health enthusiast who helped Moderna invent the mRNA vaccine in real time. The retired firefighter who left the safety of Colorado to lend a hand in the Bronx as the disease ravaged working-class communities. A culinary teacher in Kentucky who kept people employed, and others fed, as the nation shut down. We lived through these times, and now Gilsinan helps us see the heroics all around us. It makes for a surprisingly suspenseful story.
For Gilsinan, a journalist based in St. Louis, finding the helpers was less of a challenge than narrowing down which ones to profile — and then getting them to find the time to talk to her, over and over and over again, during one of the busiest and most stressful times of their lives. Take Hamilton Bennett — as Gilsinan describes her, “this millennial literally saving the world” at Moderna.
https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2022-03-25/as-the-pandemic-raged-kathy-gilsinan-found-the-helpers