The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19

by Mark Honigsbaum

Friday, May 21, 2021

Featured image for The Pandemic Century

Full of detail about plague, parrot fever, AIDS, Legionnaire‘s disease (unexpectedly fascinating), Ebola & more. It’s technical and a bit gory in places - I’m not good at reading medical descriptions to say the least - but on the whole it’s very readable and mostly written for a non-expert audience. Obviously it was written for the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic - the Covid-19 bit at the end feels hurriedly rewritten and perhaps takes away from the message that human activity - colonisation, urbanisation, globalisation - has brought all these diseases to us & that “nature is the biggest bioterrorist of all”.