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A review by jeanetterenee
Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic Of 1918 And The Search For The Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata
Did not finish.
If you're looking for a book about what it was like to experience the 1918 flu pandemic, this is not the book you want. The title of this book should be The Search for the Virus That Caused the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918. It starts off with a little bit about the actual pandemic, and the rest of the book is long detailed histories of all the doctors and researchers who tried to figure out how the virus worked, where it came from, and if it had somehow survived for decades in the bodies of those who died from it. There's also quite a lot of discussion of other pandemics of the 20th century, and the efforts to discover if those viruses were somehow "descendants" of that 1918 strain.
This is the third book I have started and abandoned in my quest to find a book that provides a narrative of what it was like to actually live through the 1918 pandemic. Onward!
If you're looking for a book about what it was like to experience the 1918 flu pandemic, this is not the book you want. The title of this book should be The Search for the Virus That Caused the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918. It starts off with a little bit about the actual pandemic, and the rest of the book is long detailed histories of all the doctors and researchers who tried to figure out how the virus worked, where it came from, and if it had somehow survived for decades in the bodies of those who died from it. There's also quite a lot of discussion of other pandemics of the 20th century, and the efforts to discover if those viruses were somehow "descendants" of that 1918 strain.
This is the third book I have started and abandoned in my quest to find a book that provides a narrative of what it was like to actually live through the 1918 pandemic. Onward!