Cassandra, 2019

      Imagine you were a Ph.D. head-candler and college professor.  Now imagine you were interested in a particular corner of your discipline, wrote a book about it and it was commerically published, initially to less than stellar sales.

     And then events caught up to your topic....

      Meet Dr. Steven Taylor.*  He's a Psych professor at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver.  His book, The Psychology Of Pandemics, hit the shelves in October, 2019 and did about as well as you might expect.  (Okay, I might have bought it; but I was fascinated to read an authoritative history of the Bubonic Plague a few years ago.)  Sales have picked up rather a bit since then.

      He's got a blog, too.  From what I have seen of the book and his blog, Dr. Taylor is descriptive rather than prescriptive; he's interested in seeing what real people do in the real world and investigating why they do it.  He's not judging anyone's merit, just looking at their words and actions (and their consequences) as they are.   That's fascinating to me and perhaps useful in making sense of the present mess.

      I'm looking at the Amazon sample of his book now.  It's not inexpensive but it looks like it just might be worth the price.
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* A websearch for "Steven Taylor, Ph.D." turns up quite a few.  Several have psych degrees; several have written books.  They are nevertheless not all the same person.