A timely and nuanced book that sets the author's experience as a nursing home volunteer during the pandemic alongside the wisdom of five great thinkers who confronted their own plagues. In any time of disruption, grief, or uncertainty, many of us seek comfort or wisdom in the work of great writers who endured similar circumstances. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, historian and biographer Robert Zaretsky did much the same while also working as a volunteer in a nursing home in south Texas. When not caring for those isolated by the health crisis, he turned to great novelists, essayists, and historians of the past to help him make sense of his experiences at the residence and the emotional and physical enormity of the pandemic. In Victories Never Last Zaretsky weaves his reflections on the pandemic siege of his nursing home with the experiences of six writers during their own times of plague: Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, and Albert Camus, whose The Plague provides the title of this book. Zaretsky delves into these writers to uncover lessons that can provide deeper insight into our pandemic era. At the same time, he goes beyond the literature to invoke his own experience of the tragedy that enveloped his Texas nursing home, one which first took the form of chronic loneliness and then, inevitably, the deaths of many residents whom we come to know through Zaretsky's stories. In doing so, Zaretsky shows the power of great literature to connect directly to one's own life in a different moment and time. For all of us still struggling to comprehend this pandemic and its toll, Zaretsky serves as a thoughtful and down-to-earth guide to the many ways we can come to know and make peace with human suffering.

"In Victories Never Last, Zaretsky writes that the task of literature is not to offer truth claims of one sort or another, but rather to offer stories,particularly those stories that “affirm the density of our lives." - Jewish Herald Voice

"Zaretsky. . . provides his thoughts on plague in the time of Thucydides (great plague of Athens, 430 BCE), Marcus Aurelius (Antonine plague, 160s CE), Michel de Montaigne (1585), Daniel Defoe (1720 and looking back at 1664–65), and Albert Camus (Nazism as a plague, la peste brune), devoting a chapter to each. In each chapter, Zaretsky links some aspect of the plague under discussion with his volunteer experiences during COVID-19, when he visited and fed residents confined to their rooms in a particular nursing home. Recommended."  - Choice

"Each page of Victories never last churns the readers’ heart making them think of the absurdities and the existential crises that COVID-19 has brought into our lives. The authors and philosophers Zaretsky associated and identified himself with described the same absurdity and existential struggles during their times. Because he acknowledged and celebrated their impact on his life during the pandemic, this book finds Zaretsky a place next to those authors. Victories never last is a tribute to the plague literature, an elegy for the lives lost to COVID-19 and an ode to joy for those who survived SARS-CoV-2." - The Lancet

"Zaretsky’s expositions are pithy, and that, combined with the poignancy of the residents’ stories, kept me engaged until the end." - British Society for Literature and Science

"Literary-minded readers will find much to consider." - Publishers Weekly