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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
A very well researched book that gave an amazing, and chilling, slice of life narrative about the Spanish Flu. My biggest issue with the narrative was the attempt to fit like 20 bios in one book. The author is obviously a big fan of all the scientists that played a roll, which is fair, but I found that they would be mentioned and put on a pedestal but I never fully understood what their role actually was. At the end, he only tied up the ends of one of the many scientists mentioned, and never followed through on the hints to amazing discoveries a different scientist had supposedly made. I gave three stars for the amazing research and for all the things I learned from it, but it was definitely not the book I wanted it to be.
This author is incredibly thorough, and I think the right reader could easily rate this five stars. I learned a lot and it held my interest some of the time, but the depth was just too much for a layman like me who just wanted some more history and background on the epidemic. I did read the whole thing and I do have a lot of respect for this author; I just wasn't the right audience for this particular book.
challenging
dark
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Like many I was drawn to this book because if the current pandemic. There was good information in it and the author obviously did a lot of research, but it was poorly organized and seemed more a history of medicine with the influenza pandemic as an organizing theme than a real history of the pandemic. I couldn’t keep track of all the scientists whose stories were told in segments throughout the book, and because I listed to the audio version it was difficult to go back to refresh my memory. I learned a lot but it became a chore to finish it. The Afterword was maybe the most interesting as it described what needed to be done to prepare for a pandemic, which we obviously did not do.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Fascinating and easy to read given the possibly complex subject matter, but it did not need to be quite so long.
This was a very slow but steady read for me. I sometimes got bogged down with a little too much detail, but overall a very interesting book about the last pandemic. Eerie how the afterwards warned that the next pandemic was imminent and now here we are.
This book is long and exhaustively researched-I appreciated all the historic context and found it to be a relatively enthralling listen despite its length. Lots of room to compare the 1918 experiences recounted here to my own 2020 experience. The author includes pretty much every region of the globe (to various extents-it is primarily focused on the US) and some of the language and attitudes used feels quite outdated and almost hostile a couple of decades after publication.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
A sweeping and engrossing book, which is more frighteningly relevant than ever now that we find ourselves in the midst of another pandemic. I learned a lot from this book, far beyond a timeline of a historic event. It is a dense, but surprisingly quick read. Highly recommend.