Emotions ran high at Tuesday’s standing-room-only book launch for Eric Klinenberg’s book about 2020 — the year COVID changed our lives
February 15, 2024 Elizabeth Kuster
Nell Freudenberger and Eric Klinenberg. Photos: John McCarten/Brooklyn Eagle
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BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — Tuesday may have been Brooklyn’s snowiest day in two years, but it was a case of nor’easter be damned for the launch of best-selling author Eric Klinenberg’s highly anticipated nonfiction book “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.”
Indeed, it was standing room only in the Great Hall at the Center for Brooklyn History in Brooklyn Heights, with the night’s topic giving the occasional cough a rather uncomfortable significance.
Klinenberg, a sociologist and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, was in conversation with Nell Freudenberger, author of the forthcoming pandemic-related novel “The Limits.” “Thanks, everyone, for schlepping here tonight,” he began, after admitting that he’d been in a “dark cloud all day” from fear that the snow would cancel the in-person event. “I was terrified that we’d repeat 2020, and everyone would do this remotely, and no one would show up. So it’s fantastic to be in a room full of beautiful Brooklyn human beings.”