A review by buttons09
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

4.0

This book was not what I expected. More than 50 percent of the book is about the sorry state of American medicine leading up to and during the 1918 pandemic and the scientists that changed everything for the better while trying to figure out the cause of the pandemic. It was hard keeping track of the many different scientists followed throughout. I was hoping the book would document in detail the closing of schools, businesses, churches, mask wearing, etc. and give answers as to their effectiveness in the spread of a pandemic (too see if we learned anything and applied it to the COVID-19 pandemic). In the afterword he mentions he planned to write the book in 2.5 to three years, but after he started adding the history about American medicine and the stories about the scientists it ended up taking seven years. That should’ve been his first clue, or his editor’s first clue, to break it up into two books or stay focused on the original topic.