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A review by cameliarose
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry
informative
3.0
A detailed book on the 1918-1919 Influenza pandemic-how it started (from Kansas, US), how it spread all over the world (through US army participating in WWI), how the US government, army, scientific society and general public dealt with the pandemic, and its lasting impact.
The book is very dry to read. The writing is repetitive and it drags on and on. Part 1 is the development of American medical science (public health study, John Hopkins Medical School etc...). Part 2 is mostly US politics (Woodrow Wilson, WWI and how wartime censorship was implemented). The rest is about the pandemic. The book should be better titled as "The Great Influenza and How the US Dealt With It", because it covers only a little outside the United States.
At least 50m people (5% world population) had been wiped out by the pandemic, which is equivalent to 390m people today. There were three waves in the pandemic, the second wave the worst. In US, the condition in East Coast was worse than the west coast. San Francisco managed relatively well among big cities in US. Scientists did not find out the pathogen until many years later. The genome of the virus was sequenced in 2005.
What strikes me most is that how the US politics today regarding Covid-19 has much in common with what happened in the 1918-1919 pandemic. Human race have memories as short as those of a gold fish.
The book is very dry to read. The writing is repetitive and it drags on and on. Part 1 is the development of American medical science (public health study, John Hopkins Medical School etc...). Part 2 is mostly US politics (Woodrow Wilson, WWI and how wartime censorship was implemented). The rest is about the pandemic. The book should be better titled as "The Great Influenza and How the US Dealt With It", because it covers only a little outside the United States.
At least 50m people (5% world population) had been wiped out by the pandemic, which is equivalent to 390m people today. There were three waves in the pandemic, the second wave the worst. In US, the condition in East Coast was worse than the west coast. San Francisco managed relatively well among big cities in US. Scientists did not find out the pathogen until many years later. The genome of the virus was sequenced in 2005.
What strikes me most is that how the US politics today regarding Covid-19 has much in common with what happened in the 1918-1919 pandemic. Human race have memories as short as those of a gold fish.