Marie Brenner is the author of more than half a dozen books and a writer at large for Vanity Fair. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker, a contributing editor at New York, and has won numerous awards for her reporting around the world. Her exposé of the tobacco industry was the basis for the 1999 movie The Insider. She also produced the 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? COVID-19 arrived in New York City in the spring of 2020. As America’s largest metropolis engaged in a war against the virus, it became apparent that the death count could be in the hundreds of thousands. Brenner had unprecedented 18-month access to the entire New York-Presbyterian hospital system, and in The Desperate Hours: One Hospital’s Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic’s Front Lines (Flatiron Books), she takes readers inside secure ICU units, sealed operating rooms, locked executive suites, unknown basement workshops, and makeshift clinics, providing extraordinary witness to the front line of the war. It is an intimate portrait of courageous men and women – doctors, nurses, residents, researchers, and suppliers – coming together in their devotion to duty, their families, each other, and the city they love.