Join us as we celebrate the launch of Hot Spot: A Doctor’s Diary From the Pandemic with author Dr. Alex Jahangir at Nashville Public Library! The event will include a panel discussion of how Nashville weathered the COVID-19 storm, moderated by John Seigenthaler.
About Hot Spot: When Nashville identified its first case of coronavirus in March 2020, the city was between Public Health Department directors and as unprepared as the rest of the world for what was to come. Dr. Alex Jahangir, a trauma surgeon acting at that time as chair of the Metro Nashville Board of Health, unexpectedly found himself head of the city’s COVID-19 Task Force and responsible for leading it through uncharted waters.
What followed was a year of unprecedented challenge and scrutiny. Jahangir, who immigrated to the US from Iran at age six, grew up in Nashville. He thought he knew the city well. But the pandemic laid bare ethnic, racial, and cultural tensions that daily threatened to derail what should have been a collective effort to keep residents healthy and safe.
Hot Spot is Jahangir’s narrative of the first year of COVID, derived from his op notes (the journal-like entries surgeons often keep following operations) and expanded to include his personal reflections and a glimpse into the inner sanctums of city and state governance in crisis.
“In Alex Jahangir’s Hot Spot, we are all patients under the care of a doctor who recounts in simple, relatable stories what we went through during the pandemic and how we can get better together.”
—John Whyte, MD, MPH, Chief Medical Officer, WebMD
“Hot Spot lays out the backdrop and prescription of how we can be better prepared for the next big natural disaster or health challenge. A must-read for those who will lead.”
—Senator Bill Frist, MD, former Majority Leader of the US Senate
“Now, more than ever, we need doctors who see the story behind the symptoms, who want to tell the truth and tell it well, and dynamically. This book does that work. We are lucky to have physicians of such competence and sound spirit in this, and indeed in any, time of crisis.”
—Caroline Randall Williams, author of Lucy Negro, Redux and Soul Food Love and writer in residence at Vanderbilt University
“Alex Jahangir’s Hot Spot is more than a doctor’s diary of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a profound and timely commentary on the toxic cloud of hate, selfishness, and mistrust that permeates American life at this moment in history, and the warm beams of love, selflessness, and truth that still emerge, even in unlikely places. This book will be an invaluable time capsule for future historians, but it’s also an urgent call to persevere through what appear to be impossible challenges.”
—Andrew Maraniss, New York Times–bestselling author of Strong Inside, Games of Deception, Singled Out, and Inaugural Ballers
About the authors:
Dr. Alex Jahangir, an orthopaedic trauma surgeon, is vice-chair of Orthopaedic Surgery and professor of Orthopaedic Surgery, Medicine, and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Jahangir was named to the Metro Nashville Board of Health in 2017. He served as head of the Metro Nashville COVID-19 Task Force for the entire two years of the Task Force’s existence.
Katie Seigenthaler is a managing partner with FINN Partners and a former journalist with the Chicago Tribune.
