It’s hard for me to gauge exactly how interesting a book like this may be to someone else, because when asked about my fantasy dream career, I say epidemiologist. And not the fun kind – the data wonk kind. I think objectively, this book is objectively “exciting” if you have a tolerance for fairly dry excitement, and a lot of details on slow, frustrating, painstaking searches for pathogens, outbreaks, sources of contamination, and underlying causes of the things that plague us. Despite the rather dramatic […]
“These are the frail, imperfect ways of ordinary human beings in the teeth of a great epidemic”
I finished reading this book a week ago today, and I’m still not sure how to write about it. I found it deeply moving, but it may still be too soon to put my thoughts and feelings into words, and anything I write here can only scratch the surface. Jonny Steinberg has packed so much into the 326 pages of Three-Letter Plague (published in the U.S. under the title Sizwe’s Test). He writes about his own literal and figurative journey to try to learn how […]
This Book has Everything: Buboes, Iron Lungs, a Kennedy, and a Vegan Teetotaler Who’s Actually a Pretty Cool Guy
I wish I could remember what it was that first sparked my interest in communicable diseases (and some noncommunicable), but I’ll tell you, there are just not enough books out there to quench my thirst on this topic. I’ve read just about every public health book on the subject that I can get my hands on (and if anyone out there has read a great book on malaria, please send it my way. I’ve been looking for one for a few years now). Get Well […]
I’d go the whole wide world just to find her
This is a fantastic book. I know, I’m late to the game on this one, and I’m not sure why it took me so long to get to it. The premise bummed me out, a little. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is three stories. First, it’s the life story of Henrietta Lacks, a woman who died of cancer at age 31 and whose cells were cultured for use in tissue research. Next, it’s the story of what happened to those cells, whose remarkable ability […]