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Featured Science Author
Featured Science AuthorFeatured Science Author - David Quammen
David Quammen is an award-winning science journalist (Harper's, Outside, National Geographic) and author whose twelve books include The Song of the Dodo, Natural Acts, and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. He researched his new book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, for the last six years. While much of his reading for it was quite technical, here are handful of books he regards as "among the best, the most readable, or the most widely relevant for any member of the breathing and reading public."
This deeply researched but very readable social history won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Deservingly. With a cast of characters ranging from Simon Flexner (first director of the Rockefeller Institute) to FDR (of course) to Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and the charismatic Australian "healer" Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the book does more than trace the history of a disease and a campaign of response. It also explores how one virus galvanized fears inordinately, affected medical research and fundraising, and became an iconic bugaboo in mid-twentieth-century America. Read Polio, and you'll never think about the March of Dimes in quite the same way again. Buy Now
Before the great polio scare and the Salk and Sabin vaccines of the 1950s, there was smallpox. Willrich estimates that it killed 300 million people in the twentieth century alone. But the earliest vaccines were sometimes dangerous too, and when smallpox vaccination was made compulsory (for the sake of society at large, by way of "herd immunity"), some serious challenges to civil liberties arose. The issue went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Pox is a troubling case history on the tension between private rights and public health. Buy Now
Influenza is still the gorilla in the room. The flu bug of 1918, an especially nasty variant of avian H1N1, is thought to have killed at least 50 million people, and hundreds of thousands die annually, even now, from "routine" seasonal flu. That's a big enough story but, like Oshinsky and Willrich, Barry embeds his disease chronicle in a broader social context-in this case, the transformation of medical education in America, spreading outward from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, founded in 1893. Barry's prose is a bit too punched up and portentous for my taste, but there's much in this book to learn. Buy Now
As the title implies, they're everywhere. Viruses are not always pestilential to humans, but they've been vastly successful as a life form on Earth. With chapters on West Nile, human papillomavirus, cold viruses, viruses of the oceans, giant viruses, and some of the more nefarious viral beasts, this little book is a fine primer from a trusted science reporter, author, and blogger. Buy Now
Rabies is a zoonotic disease, meaning it passes from nonhuman animals into humans. Coauthors Wasik and Murphy trace it back to ancient Babylon, India's Ayurveda medical tradition, and Aristotle's History of Animals. The rabies virus, so lethal to people, so fiendishly well adapted, causes biting behavior by its effect on the brain and travels from host to host in saliva. It's highly evolved for its station in life. Keep that in mind when you next hear about Intelligent Design. Buy Now
AIDS too is a zoonosis, acquired originally by humans from chimpanzees. Understanding its ecological origins and its first wave of proliferation may help lead toward better treatments, and is certainly crucial to protecting humanity from another such event. Jacques Pepin (don't confuse this man with the chef), after four years as medical officer in a Zairean bush hospital, then decades of research, offers some important, unexpected ideas about the early spread of HIV. He suggests that the pandemic may have taken hold in Central Africa, during the first few decades of the twentieth century, in part because of the reuse of needles in campaigns against other infectious diseases. Buy Now
The Evolution and Emergence of RNA Viruses
If you want a short, lucid book that takes you straight to the scientific core of what's known about scary new viruses emerging all over the world, this is it. Holmes is a professor of biology at Penn State, a brilliant man capable of plain talk. Cheer up: Evolution, even the evolution of dangerous viruses, is an amazing pageant. Buy Now
Cancer is not generally an infectious disease (except see the Tasmanian devil and its transmissible tumor), but I include the Mukherjee on this list because it's such a fine book and because cancer is so widespread and ineluctable in modern society that it might as well be contagious. It's a dire medical experience that we should all expect to share, if not personally, then at the proximity of loved ones. Comprehension is always better than ignorant fear, and Mukherjee delivers medicine for the mind. Buy Now
Back in the early 1970s, before the world had heard of AIDS or SARS, when Ebola was still just the name of a river, McNeill, a historian with a very broad grasp of world history, dashed off this meditation on how infectious diseases have shaped civilization. The book is now dated by unfolding events, but it's still very solid on patterns and principles. Buy Now
Forget what you were told in college about construing it as some kind of allegory. This 1948 novel is worth reading again for what's on the page-the texture of humanity under duress and Dr. Rieux's stalwart assertion of "what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise." Who says Camus was gloomy? The Plague may be a necessary book for our future. Buy Now
