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It’s flu season, let’s talk about all the diseases that can kill you…

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah

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Now that flu season is in full swing, and our flu shots aren’t doing us much good this year, it’s a good time to talk about all the disgusting diseases that can kill you. But let’s up the stakes and focus on diseases that spread worldwide, we’re talking cholera, Ebola, SARS…pandemic level contagions. Sonia Shah’s book, Pandemic, focuses heavily on cholera, tracking its meager beginnings to its reemergence today. Shah believes that by studying cholera, many other world diseases can be understood. But she doesn’t […]

The End of Everything and How We Got There

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014) – I fear this review will make this book seem much more convoluted than it really is, but I’m going to try and give it the credit it’s due.  The premise is a simple one: there’s been a worldwide pandemic where most of humanity is dead and the few survivors in the twenty years that follow fight brigands, cultists, and a world slowly devolving into barbarism.  Technology is gone, borders no longer exist, medicine is a memory. […]

Viruses and bacteria and parasites, oh my!

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah

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When I started reading “Pandemic” I was skeptical about whether it could teach me anything new, I’ve treated patients with Malaria, HIV, Brucella and Leishmania (although I have yet to encounter Cholera) and many more exotic pathogens, but was pleasantly surprised at how much there is to be gleamed from this short yet dense book. “Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional”, this may seem like an odd proposition, but throughout her book, Shah shows how it is human agency and institutions that help spread […]

A well-intentioned mess

Love is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson

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(2.5 stars) This was a tough book to read and will be a tough review to write. Love is the Drug is a very ambitious book that plots contemporary social issues and a story of developing one’s identity and independence against the background of a bioterrorist pandemic. Ultimately, I think Johnson just had too many ideas here and as a result several threads were underdeveloped and/or incoherent. Emily Bird, who goes by Bird, is from an affluent black family in Washington DC. Her parents are […]



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