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whitakk's review against another edition
3.0
Reading this book now is quite the roller-coaster, and I wonder how I would have read it six months ago. On one hand you hit parts that are supposed to be dramatic and incredible but now seem obvious: 4500 deaths in one city in one week? Well, we just witnessed that again. Politicians making trade-offs between disease control and other considerations? Sadly familiar. People afraid to cross paths with one another on the street? Yawn. But on the other hand, some aspect seem even less fathomable today: Woodrow Wilson never even mentioned the disease publicly (for fear of distracting from the war effort), and many newspapers did the same, even as more than 500,000 Americans were dying from it.
Unfortunately the book itself is a slog -- not only is the writing overwrought and hard to trust in places, but it takes 300-some pages to get to what life during the pandemic was actually like. There are five chapters at the beginning on just the history of American medical education, and then long detours through the backgrounds of scientists who were working on the cure, which I didn't get into as much as certain other members of my household might. Maybe it's unfair to judge the book through my eyes today, since the kind of people who would have read this in the Before Times would have had different motivations -- but if you're looking to read this book for context on our current times, be ready to skim through a lot of stuff that isn't so relevant.
Maybe the biggest implicit lesson from this book is that science is slow -- during the outbreak the common belief was that the influenza was caused by a bacteria, and it took years or even decades for researchers to really understand what had happened. Our scientific institutions are better today and we simply have more researchers, so hopefully we can do better than that, but it's likely there's still a lot we don't know about COVID-19 and how it does or doesn't spread.
Some other facts:
- Civilian healthcare was already poor in 1918-19 because many doctors and especially nurses had joined the war effort
- Most Western newspapers censored negative news during the war, but neutral Spain didn’t, so Spanish papers published most about the flu -- hence the name (even though its first identified outbreak was in Kansas)
- Local outbreaks were severe but lasted only 6-8 weeks, with a fall that was as steep as the rise. Areas that had been hit harder by the (milder) first wave were generally less affected by the second.
- Little was written about the flu in literature of the post-pandemic period for some reason; the same pattern had been seen after the bubonic plague
Unfortunately the book itself is a slog -- not only is the writing overwrought and hard to trust in places, but it takes 300-some pages to get to what life during the pandemic was actually like. There are five chapters at the beginning on just the history of American medical education, and then long detours through the backgrounds of scientists who were working on the cure, which I didn't get into as much as certain other members of my household might. Maybe it's unfair to judge the book through my eyes today, since the kind of people who would have read this in the Before Times would have had different motivations -- but if you're looking to read this book for context on our current times, be ready to skim through a lot of stuff that isn't so relevant.
Maybe the biggest implicit lesson from this book is that science is slow -- during the outbreak the common belief was that the influenza was caused by a bacteria, and it took years or even decades for researchers to really understand what had happened. Our scientific institutions are better today and we simply have more researchers, so hopefully we can do better than that, but it's likely there's still a lot we don't know about COVID-19 and how it does or doesn't spread.
Some other facts:
- Civilian healthcare was already poor in 1918-19 because many doctors and especially nurses had joined the war effort
- Most Western newspapers censored negative news during the war, but neutral Spain didn’t, so Spanish papers published most about the flu -- hence the name (even though its first identified outbreak was in Kansas)
- Local outbreaks were severe but lasted only 6-8 weeks, with a fall that was as steep as the rise. Areas that had been hit harder by the (milder) first wave were generally less affected by the second.
- Little was written about the flu in literature of the post-pandemic period for some reason; the same pattern had been seen after the bubonic plague
nancyadelman's review against another edition
3.0
This is a nonfiction history book about the Spanish Flu or Great Flu outbreak that occurred around 1917-1918, during World War I. The author writes about the origins of the Flu in the United States and the scientists who worked to unravel its mysteries, as well as the thousands of people affected by it. In so doing he also writes about the history of modern medicine and the scientific discoveries by the doctors working to find a cure.
I was expecting to like this book more than I actually did. The first 80 or so pages is about the physicians that the author is planning to spend the rest of the book writing about, so he gives you a complete biographical rundown of all of them. My problem with that is he gives the reader too much information and I was bored stiff. He then turned to the creation of modern medicine, and honestly, I knew that Johns Hopkins Medical Center was a pretty important place but I really did not know that they were as instrumental in developing modern medicine, so kudos to the author for teaching me all about that. That bit was really interesting. There was another bit about President Woodrow Wilson being affected by the Flu and how that might have directly caused World War II! There is an Afterword section in which the author talks about how the next giant pandemic could spread easily thanks to worldwide travel opportunities and be more deadly because of people with weakened immune systems. He basically predicted the Covid-19 outbreak of 2020 though his numbers I think were lower than what is actually happening. I think that this section could stand to be redone and updated post-Covid.
Once you get past all the biography stuff, then you start to get into the flu and it seems that he writes endlessly about the science processes and occasionally turns to to write about the social aspects of the flul. Being a social worker, I was much more interested in the social aspects than the cell replication processes. Other people on this site have written that the editor seems to have edited this book strangely, which I did not get until I started reading it. And yes, this book is edited strangely. Like one chapter will be about one person. The entire chapter will be about one person. Then in the very last paragraph the writing will shift so that the author is writing about someone completely different, and then chapter break. I get that the author needs to blend the writing about one person into the writing about the next person but the abrupt shift is just really jarring. I wished that the author would have spent much more time writing about the social aspects of the flu than the test tubes and microscopic things. I was seriously thinking of putting the book down and walking away from it forever, but I kept looking ahead and saw that there was a better section coming up in like 10 pages or so, so I stuck with it.
This book is good if you're into microscopic type science books, particularly a combination of history and microscopic science. Not so much for how society was affected by the Great Flu. This book is also thicker than I had anticipated, at 465 pages of text (548 if you're counting the index and appendix). I am giving this book three stars because of the odd editing and the too-frequent boredom.
I was expecting to like this book more than I actually did. The first 80 or so pages is about the physicians that the author is planning to spend the rest of the book writing about, so he gives you a complete biographical rundown of all of them. My problem with that is he gives the reader too much information and I was bored stiff. He then turned to the creation of modern medicine, and honestly, I knew that Johns Hopkins Medical Center was a pretty important place but I really did not know that they were as instrumental in developing modern medicine, so kudos to the author for teaching me all about that. That bit was really interesting. There was another bit about President Woodrow Wilson being affected by the Flu and how that might have directly caused World War II! There is an Afterword section in which the author talks about how the next giant pandemic could spread easily thanks to worldwide travel opportunities and be more deadly because of people with weakened immune systems. He basically predicted the Covid-19 outbreak of 2020 though his numbers I think were lower than what is actually happening. I think that this section could stand to be redone and updated post-Covid.
Once you get past all the biography stuff, then you start to get into the flu and it seems that he writes endlessly about the science processes and occasionally turns to to write about the social aspects of the flul. Being a social worker, I was much more interested in the social aspects than the cell replication processes. Other people on this site have written that the editor seems to have edited this book strangely, which I did not get until I started reading it. And yes, this book is edited strangely. Like one chapter will be about one person. The entire chapter will be about one person. Then in the very last paragraph the writing will shift so that the author is writing about someone completely different, and then chapter break. I get that the author needs to blend the writing about one person into the writing about the next person but the abrupt shift is just really jarring. I wished that the author would have spent much more time writing about the social aspects of the flu than the test tubes and microscopic things. I was seriously thinking of putting the book down and walking away from it forever, but I kept looking ahead and saw that there was a better section coming up in like 10 pages or so, so I stuck with it.
This book is good if you're into microscopic type science books, particularly a combination of history and microscopic science. Not so much for how society was affected by the Great Flu. This book is also thicker than I had anticipated, at 465 pages of text (548 if you're counting the index and appendix). I am giving this book three stars because of the odd editing and the too-frequent boredom.
caitibeth's review against another edition
3.0
Parts of this book are quite interesting. The middle section - which is the part about the influenza virus - was informative and intriguing. The first third and last third, unfortunately, are less engrossing; it feels like what Barry really wanted to write was a sprawling history of American medical science. While this was occasionally enjoyable, it was too shallow and too broadly drawn to succeed in this pursuit. A more focused history of American medical science could have worked well, and I would have appreciated a longer, fuller history of the epidemic, but in the end Barry gave me neither.
sbutton82's review against another edition
4.0
First of all, I now have a new respect for the influenza virus, and will continue to get my Flu Shot yearly. With that said, the book has its good and bad moments. So, lets start with some of the good. Its written in a way that anyone can read it, you don't have to have a medical or scientific background to understand the story. I learned a lot not only about the influenza virus, but also epidemics and pandemics. Now for the bad. This story is extremly repetitive. I have read a few reviews stating how horrible this book was because it repeats itself so frequently. I started noticing it towards the end of the book, and was begning to get annoyed, but then I looked at it in another way. I have a medical background, and recently atteneded a discussion on health literacy. ON average for a patient to understand the importance of a diagnosis, test result, or life style change, it takes 3 times of hearing the same information before it really begins to sink in and they understand or take action. When I look at the book this way, I realized how important the infomration is. Not only is the author trying to tell the story of the 1918 influenza pandemic, but also to prevent it in the future. By repeating the death tolls and the mistakes that were made to prevent the spread of the disease, the reality that this could happen again begins to sink in.
Taking the good with the bad I would recommed this book to everyone.
Taking the good with the bad I would recommed this book to everyone.
contagion5's review against another edition
3.0
Do you remember that high school teacher who would get distracted and go off on an only slightly relevant tangent? That's this book. It is an interesting look at the Spanish Influenza and everything else.
heidilreads's review against another edition
2.0
I felt like I had to figure out what the focus was of each book and the ending seemed very odd...
bookwormwendy's review against another edition
4.0
I found this interesting and informative. It was different from what I expected, discussing a lot of the science and background of the influenza epidemic.
gwynne104's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
medium-paced
4.25
Pulls together threads from medical history, international politics, military studies, biology, sociology, municipal histories. Important structures on which to hang out understanding of how pandemics can happen and the still very present dangers in society that make them more likely to be deadly.