A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
The most timely and informative history book you will read this year, tracing a century of pandemics, with a new chapter on COVID-19.
Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease.
[A] riveting, vivid history of modern disease outbreaks ... A fascinating account of a deeply important topic—for if the past 100 years have taught us anything, it is that new diseases and viral strains will inevitably beset us, no matter how sophisticated science becomes.
A lively but less than reassuring read for those on exotic travels.
Some of the scenes in Mark Honigsbaum’s
The Pandemic Century were so vivid they had me drafting movie treatments in my head ... Whether familiar or forgotten, parrot fever or Ebola, he finds striking similarities among them. And those similarities ought to make us worried about the next outbreak. If history is any guide, things may not go well.
Gripping.
Mark Honigsbaum does a superb job covering a century’s worth of pandemics and the fears they invariably unleash. The moral of his cogent tale is that the next deadly pandemic is not a matter of
if but of
when, and preparing for that fact is a far better prescription than reacting with panic, fear, or indifference.
Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian, journalist, and author of five books including
The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris and
The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria. He hosts the podcast series, 'Going Viral: The Mother of all Pandemics', marking the centenary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. His TED-ED animation, ‘How Pandemics Spread’, has been viewed more than 2.75 million times. He is a former chief reporter of the Observer and holds a PhD in medical history. He is currently a lecturer at City University, London.