The Desperate Hours Audiobook By Marie Brenner cover art

The Desperate Hours

One Hospital's Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic's Front Lines

Preview
Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Desperate Hours

By: Marie Brenner
Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $24.74

Buy for $24.74

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

A remarkable depiction of 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

In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 arrived in New York City.

Before long, America’s largest metropolis was at war against a virus that mercilessly swept through its five boroughs. It became apparent that if COVID wasn’t somehow halted, the death count in New York alone would be in the hundreds of thousands. And if New York’s hospitals failed, what chance did the rest of the country have?

In The Desperate Hours, award-winning journalist Marie Brenner, having been granted unprecedented 18-month access to the entire New York-Presbyterian hospital system, tells the story of the doctors, nurses, residents, researchers, and suppliers who tried to save lives across Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn and the northern periphery of the city. Drawing on more than 200 interviews, Brenner takes us inside secure ICU units, sealed operating rooms, locked executive suites, unknown basement workshops, and makeshift clinics to provide extraordinary witness to the war as it was waged on the front line.

But The Desperate Hours is more than a thrilling account of medicine under extreme pressure. It is an intimate portrait of courageous men and women coming together in their devotion to duty, their families, each other, and the city they loved more than any other.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

©2022 Marie Brenner (P)2022 Macmillan Audio
Physical Illness & Disease Sociology
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_T1_webcro805_stickypopup
All stars
Most relevant  
Great book to understand all the trial and tribulations hospitals and the long term effects still be experienced

A must read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Everyone should listen to this book to know what happened and what could happen again if we don’t value Public Health.

Excellent

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

excellent look into the behind the scenes of the pandemic. too many names though. couldn't keep track of who was who.

Great story.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I could not stop listening to this vivid and thoughtful account. Highly recommend this book.

Riveting account of COVID surge at NY “best” hospital

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Think you don’t want to think about the early days of Covid? Think again! Wow! Amazing reporting, amazing characters, amazing book!

Absolutely riveting tale

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

The author disliked Donald Trump; as do I, to an extent. It was clear from the initial chapters. I thought the book was very engaging and well-written, then came the last chapters. I didn't really see the need to include George Floyd in the narrative. I don't see how his murder really influenced COVID-19 at all. I think the writer's political biases ruined a potentially great book.

I'm looking forward to future non-fiction books on the COVID-19 outbreak. This was a weak attempt at assigning blame.

Way too much politics

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.