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We learned nothing.

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

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

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I read The Great Influenza a few months ago after coming across it. I think I would have read it regardless of the current pandemic as I still believe my knowledge of the world in the WWI era to be lacking. The Great Influenza focuses on the Spanish Flu and its impact in the United States. It also details the history of medicine and virology, specifically as it pertains to the flu. The book is long and comprehensive but I really enjoyed it.  It really […]

Not the Forgotten One Anymore

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

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If you thought the biggest disaster of the 20th century was WWII, then Laura Spinney would like to correct you, because the Spanish Flu may have killed more people than WWI and WWII combined. Death rates were relatively low in Western countries, but in many other areas of the world people died at much higher rates due to worse health care and hygienic conditions. The book was first published in 2017 and Spinney laments the fact that the Spanish Flu is the forgotten pandemic; ironically, […]

One for the times

Pale Rider by Laura Spinney

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In some very serendipitous timing, we ordered this book back in the fall, shortly before coronavirus made the news out of China.  Spinney’s history of the 1918 flu pandemic has become so very relevant, and luckily this history is also very readable- she is a science journalist, so has lots of practice translating science jargon and telling non-fiction stories.  The book is split into a number of sections with different focuses: the world that that flu emerged into (religious, superstitious, viruses as yet undiscovered, teeming […]

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

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Another flu book! Like Albert Marrin’s Very, Very, Very Dreadful, Pale Rider is an investigation into the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918-1919. Unlike Marrin’s work, however, Spinney goes more global. When Marrin focused a lot on how the Spanish flu affected World War I (and vice versa), Spinney looks at how it affected the world. She also looks more into the future — the question of a re-occurrence of a similar pandemic not if, it’s when. “Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and […]



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