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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
I picked this up in the middle of the COVID pandemic as I wanted to learn more about history's most deadly influenza pandemic, which killed between 20 to 50 million people, including about 675,000 in the US alone. The origin of the 1918 influenza virus was an army barrack in Kansas! The author goes through many mistakes that governments and researchers made. A great book and a page-turner too, it reads like a medical thriller.
challenging
informative
This book was surreal to read in a post-Covid world. So many parallels. Got very dry in places when it focused on the epidemiology of the virus, but overall was informative and worth the read in my opinion.
informative
slow-paced
I had such high hopes for this book and it left me totally cold. Barry's writing is serviceable at best and he has absolutely no interest in the actual pandemic. This is a book about a group of scientists, and it's not a particularly well told version of that story. I was never made to care about any of these people, even as I'm already well aware of many of them as someone in a public health field. But most of all, the biggest flaw here is that he's more interested in this "great men" (and two token women) than in what life was like for the average person living through this terrifying pandemic. That's the book I want to read, not this bland pile of nothing.
Loved this book for the strange times we're living in. There were portions that were a bit slow, but overall great storytelling from a dark time. It really deepened my understanding of the creation and effectiveness of vaccines.
This was an interesting read, especially while living through a pandemic, but it took me months on and off to get through. With better editing, it probably could have been 100+ pages shorter, which would have made it more engaging and less repetitive.
It is AMAZING how we are helpless in the face of such small creatures.
A fascinating overview of the 1918 pandemic, especially in light of our current state of affairs with the Covid pandemic. Barry does a good job illuminating the history of medicine in America (for me it was the most interesting part of the book). The pitiful reputation of American medicine in the 19th and early 20th century is shocking considering how far we have come. The establishment of both the Johns Hopkins and Rockefeller Institutes was a godsend for the field. Frankly, this element of the book would have been well served by more in-depth investigation. It is certainly something this reader will explore more fully.
Barry also does an excellent job describing the sheer horror of the rapid onset of the disease. One of the points that he gets across well is that while the movement of thousands of soldiers due to World War I helped the spread of the disease, it was by no means the sole mechanism for its rapid expansion. Similar to today's pandemic, mistakes made by humans (either willful or accidental) contributed mightily to the onset of the disease. Had our political leaders read this book at the beginning of the Covid nightmare we might have save thousands of lives by avoiding previous mistakes.
One problem that I have with the book is Barry's segment on Woodrow Wilson's contraction of a disease during the peace negotiations with the Germans at the end of WWI. He suggests that the unfavorable terms given to the Germans by the allies would have been mitigated had Wilson not been suffering from sequelae of what might have been the flu. This seems a facile and somewhat unconvincing argument. Certainly massive worldwide calamities have terrible unforeseen consequences, but making the claim that if only Wilson had been of sounder mind the Treaty of Versailles would have been less punitive and saved us the consequences of the rise of German fascism seems a bit of a stretch.
Another issue I had with Barry's book was his rhetorical style. He has an irritating habit of reiterating a phrase immediately after stating it once. While a useful technique for oratory, in the written word it makes the writing clumsy. This is a detraction only for style points, however. As a work of scholarship, there is much to recommend it.
Barry also does an excellent job describing the sheer horror of the rapid onset of the disease. One of the points that he gets across well is that while the movement of thousands of soldiers due to World War I helped the spread of the disease, it was by no means the sole mechanism for its rapid expansion. Similar to today's pandemic, mistakes made by humans (either willful or accidental) contributed mightily to the onset of the disease. Had our political leaders read this book at the beginning of the Covid nightmare we might have save thousands of lives by avoiding previous mistakes.
One problem that I have with the book is Barry's segment on Woodrow Wilson's contraction of a disease during the peace negotiations with the Germans at the end of WWI. He suggests that the unfavorable terms given to the Germans by the allies would have been mitigated had Wilson not been suffering from sequelae of what might have been the flu. This seems a facile and somewhat unconvincing argument. Certainly massive worldwide calamities have terrible unforeseen consequences, but making the claim that if only Wilson had been of sounder mind the Treaty of Versailles would have been less punitive and saved us the consequences of the rise of German fascism seems a bit of a stretch.
Another issue I had with Barry's book was his rhetorical style. He has an irritating habit of reiterating a phrase immediately after stating it once. While a useful technique for oratory, in the written word it makes the writing clumsy. This is a detraction only for style points, however. As a work of scholarship, there is much to recommend it.