To make sense of a year in which decades’ worth of events have happened in weeks, books help — from those that are centuries old, to those that are out of date as they hit the shelves. Just as diarist Samuel Pepys showed us the Great Plague of 1665 through the eyes of a government administrator, pandemic-era scientists, doctors, historians and journalists are already refracting history-in-the-making through the prism of their own experiences.
