Anthony Fauci, a Hero to Some and a Villain to Others, Keeps His Cool

ON CALL: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, by Anthony Fauci, M.D.

In his new memoir, Dr. Anthony Fauci bares all. After he’s unthinkingly opened a typewritten letter containing a mysterious white powder that could be anthrax (treatable with Cipro), ricin (almost certainly fatal in an Agatha Christie kind of way) or perhaps confectioner’s sugar, guys in hazmat suits arrive and order him to strip.

Following a “Silkwood” shower, Fauci has a few tense if resigned hours with his wife, Christine Grady, a nurse and bioethicist, and adult daughters before getting the all-clear. Having personally eased many patients’ passage into the Great Beyond over his almost six-decade career, he writes, “I do not fear death.”

Aside from this episode, “On Call” is a well-pressed gray flannel suit of a book with a white coat buttoned over it: a calm reply to deranged calls for this distinguished public servant’s head on a pike. Is it measured and methodical in sections? Sure. So is science.

These days, Fauci is most closely associated with Covid-19, hero or rogue depending on your political persuasion, under repeated and heated scrutiny for his messaging about masks, vaccines and the lab-leak theory. (“We must keep an open mind to the origin of Covid,” he writes with seeming weariness. “As I do.”) People blame him for their bad pandemic experience, as if he’s a waiter who served them the wrong meal and might be hiding what is going on in the kitchen.

Gently, “On Call” reminds us that Fauci oversaw an entire Seder plateful of plagues, from AIDS to Zika, as the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Washington, D.C., saving millions of lives around the world before stepping down in 2022.

He speeds through his early background. Born on Christmas Eve 1940, to first-generation Italian immigrants living in Bensonhurst, with a sister three years older, Fauci recalls the “extraordinarily soothing” sounds of foghorns in Gravesend Bay and his mother crying over photos of the mushroom cloud on the front page of the New York Daily News after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.