BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — Tuesday may have been Brooklyn’s snowiest day in two years, but it was a case of nor’easter be damned for the launch of best-selling author Eric Klinenberg’s highly anticipated nonfiction book “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.”
Indeed, it was standing room only in the Great Hall at the Center for Brooklyn History in Brooklyn Heights, with the night’s topic giving the occasional cough a rather uncomfortable significance.
Klinenberg, a sociologist and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, was in conversation with Nell Freudenberger, author of the forthcoming pandemic-related novel “The Limits.” “Thanks, everyone, for schlepping here tonight,” he began, after admitting that he’d been in a “dark cloud all day” from fear that the snow would cancel the in-person event. “I was terrified that we’d repeat 2020, and everyone would do this remotely, and no one would show up. So it’s fantastic to be in a room full of beautiful Brooklyn human beings.”
“We talked about the idea of Zoom being appropriate, and then we were like … NO,” added Freudenberger.
Klinenberg’s book is built around the 2020 stories of New Yorkers from every borough. “I wanted to do my book launch here because the Brooklyn Public Library staff introduced me to [my Brooklyn interviewee],” he told the enrapt crowd.
In Klinenberg’s view, Americans have been “off” ever since the fateful year that is the topic of his book. “We’re more distrustful, more divided,” he said. “2020 was so chaotic, so disorganized, so dysfunctional, on so many levels. Collectively, we lived through this powerful, difficult thing — then we turned our backs on it. We haven’t checked in with ourselves and processed it. And we have to.”
It’s important to note that Brooklyn has the worst COVID record of…
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