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A review by ncrabb
Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata
4.0
When the 24-hour news channels developed a morbid fascination with the Ebola virus last summer, I must admit, I did, too. Being an ardent believer in the premise that we best deal with an uncertain future if we better understand our past, I got to digging around and found this fascinating book.
Essentially, Kolata presents you with a highly readable account of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide, including millions of American young adults.
I read with horror about death tolls growing at such a rapid rate that people stopped attending funerals of their dead in large cities, piling bodies up outside in some cases for sanitation wagons to take away—and folks, this was in an American city, not some third-world place whose name we can barely pronounce.
If a plague of the same virility struck today, an estimated 1.5 million Americans would die. The flue killed more U.S. soldiers than did all of the battles of World War I. in which they participated.
If you enjoy a good mystery, you’ll like this book, since it focuses on the detective work necessary to find this disease. Indeed, this particular strain was located by scientists at a national military tissue storage facility and in a remote Alaskan cemetery inside the remains of a plus-sized Eskimo woman.
Kolata speculates on what could happen should an airborne killer disease strike again, and her perspective is sobering indeed.
If I have any criticism of this book, it is that it didn’t focus hard enough on the societal changes and impact of the 1918 flu. We had a killer on our hands, and we don’t really know where it started or why it mysteriously ended. Granted, we think that some kind of bird flu virus blended with a disease borne by pigs, and that deadly blend was carried to a human who spread what would become a killer that makes the bubonic plague rather inconsequential by comparison.
There is some science in here—you can’t have a book like this and not touch on the science of germ creation, cell penetration, etc., and of course, the stories of the competing scientists who wanted to find the virus are both interesting and unsettling.
Essentially, Kolata presents you with a highly readable account of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide, including millions of American young adults.
I read with horror about death tolls growing at such a rapid rate that people stopped attending funerals of their dead in large cities, piling bodies up outside in some cases for sanitation wagons to take away—and folks, this was in an American city, not some third-world place whose name we can barely pronounce.
If a plague of the same virility struck today, an estimated 1.5 million Americans would die. The flue killed more U.S. soldiers than did all of the battles of World War I. in which they participated.
If you enjoy a good mystery, you’ll like this book, since it focuses on the detective work necessary to find this disease. Indeed, this particular strain was located by scientists at a national military tissue storage facility and in a remote Alaskan cemetery inside the remains of a plus-sized Eskimo woman.
Kolata speculates on what could happen should an airborne killer disease strike again, and her perspective is sobering indeed.
If I have any criticism of this book, it is that it didn’t focus hard enough on the societal changes and impact of the 1918 flu. We had a killer on our hands, and we don’t really know where it started or why it mysteriously ended. Granted, we think that some kind of bird flu virus blended with a disease borne by pigs, and that deadly blend was carried to a human who spread what would become a killer that makes the bubonic plague rather inconsequential by comparison.
There is some science in here—you can’t have a book like this and not touch on the science of germ creation, cell penetration, etc., and of course, the stories of the competing scientists who wanted to find the virus are both interesting and unsettling.