In 2018, I lived in a building where every December, a generous neighbor would leave a pile of books to give away on top of the mailboxes—I imagine they were the ones they had read that year. One of those books was Flu. However, it sat in my ‘to-read’ pile until April 2020, when I thought I couldn’t keep putting it off. It seemed fitting, given the circumstances.
Only a handful of doctors and historians of the time dedicated a few lines in their memoirs to the 1918 pandemic—and it’s because no one really knew what had happened! People would fall ill and die “mysteriously,” in an era when microbiology and other areas of medical science were nowhere near what they are today.
Before reading this book, I had no idea that humanity took nearly 100 years to identify the microorganism/virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic. Nearly one hundred years! And the discovery almost didn’t happen. (Oh hey, I just realized I “discovered” the book 100 years later!!)
In Flu, Gina Kolata recounts the direct connection between the 1918 pandemic and the end of World War I; exhumations—poorly conducted, perhaps missing out on better results years later; and the pseudo-accidental details preserved in alcohol in a U.S. military lab that ultimately led to the breakthrough. And by exhumations I mean: traveling to Alaska and Norway trying to find World War I corpses buried under permafrost that might still preserve some DNA or RNA remnant of the mystery that caused the 1918 Flu.
Beautifully written, you cannot put this book down!
I recommend this book not only as an important historical account, beautifully narrated and well-researched, but also to better understand and appreciate the current state of scientific progress and the incredible efforts made during the current pandemic, in which the genomic sequence of the pathogen was identified in less than a month.
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