Why read The Pandemic Century?

Book cover of The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris

Book description

How can we understand the COVID-19 pandemic?

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing such catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. In The…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Pandemic Century as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Nancy Tomes

Author

I love this book because Mark Honigsbaum puts COVID in a sweeping historical perspective. He writes insightfully about well-known epidemics of the past century (the 1918-1919 influenza, HIV- AIDs, Ebola) and lesser-known outbreaks of diseases (like bubonic plague and parrot fever).

Honigsbaum combines good science writing with profiles of interesting characters, including microbial, animal, and human actors. Be sure to buy the new version that he revised to include COVID-19.

From Nancy's list on get you ready for the next big pandemic.

Jonathan Charteris-Black

Author

This highly informative book offers a well-written overview of most of the pandemics occurring from the “Spanish flu” of 1918 until Covid-19 of 2020. By giving a detailed historical account of everything from AIDS to SARS and Zika this book reassured me by showing how pandemics in the past had been overcome and so by implication how the Covid-19 pandemic could also be overcome. The author conducts detailed research into the exact chronology of each pandemic so that by helping to understand its epidemiology, he also creates an interesting and exciting detective story.

From Jonathan's list on the human reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic.