Im rereading And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. This book is so much more powerful now. People intentially ignoring warnings to not engage in risky sex. Researchers baffled, Doctors helpless to save their patients.
Next up two by Laurie Garrett. The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust.
What other books belong on this list?
Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the plague in London in 1665.
It’s all there : people not believing the initial reports; people minimizing the steps needed; quacks selling nostrums; people starting to avoid each other; overreactions by the authorities and by people (sometimes going so far as to nail plague houses shut so everyone in them dies); people fleeing to the countryside where the air is supposedly healthier; people in the countryside blocking access to townsfolk coming; mortality counts every day; concerns about burying all the dead; the plague gradually dying off (ha!) and people starting to mingle more, hesitantly at first, then with greater confidence by the end of the year.
Polio: An American Story was an excellent read.
Mrs Piper recommends «Mrs Dalloway» by Virginia Woolf.
See the article in the New Yorker: «Why Anxious Readers under Quarantine turn to ‘Mrs Dalloway’».
https://subterraneanpress.com/kingdom-of-needle-and-bone-free-ebook
Mira Grant’s Kingdom of Needle and Bone free today (4/23) as an ebook from Subterranean Press
Thank you all for the recs thus far.
John Barry’s The Great Influenza is a really good read about the Spanish Flu.
*The Plague * by Albert Camus is a classic.
In a different direction, I found reading * The Last Policeman* trilogy by Ben H. Winters to be cathartic during this. It’s set in a pre-apocalypse world.
flu by gina kolata
the great influenza by john barry
spillover by david quamen
h10n1 by mr Cornelius
The 4 volume Dark Biology series by Richard Preston.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I read last winter. Another book about a fictional pandemic.
And the Band Played On is a book I read over and over. There were countless things done wrong throughout the entire AIDS epidemic, and the suffering and loss of life should be grieved by everyone…forever.
The Great Influenza, mentioned by others upthread is a gripping dose of reality, especially now. The intersection of the Spanish Flu with World War I illustrated how a mobile population can rapidly spread infection.
Spitting Blood by Helen Bynum, is about the history of tuberculosis. TB is a bacterial disease treated nowdays with antibiotics. But it once was prevalent, deadly, and communicable.
For a dose of humor, both lighthearted and dark, The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald. All of her books are like old friends that you revisit occasionally. But Plague is about her diagnosis of tuberculosis and time spent in a sanitarium.
All these books are available in Kindle format.
~VOW
For a science-fictional take on a pandemic, Blood Music by Greg Bear. A scientist, faced with cancellation of his project to build simple biological computers out of blood cells, steals the project by injecting them into his own veins. They multiply and evolve and become more complex. One day he discovers that the remote descendants of his project’s cells are intelligent and talking to him. And then it gets weird.
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, about a plague village in 1666. It’s very well written, although the protagonist is a bit of a Mary-Sue, which I wouldn’t expect from this usually top-notch author. I’m about a third through The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, partly set around the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in 1980’s Chicago. Again, beautifully written, so far nothing too terrible has happened to the characters, but the chips are about to fall. I really liked Makkai’s first novel The Borrower, so I’m pleased she’s had some success with this one (Pulitzer nom, among others).
Influenza: The 100 Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic is on sale for $2.99 at Amazon for Kindle
One point was especially memorable in The Great Influenza… Some doctors got the idea to take blood from recovered patients, spin it with a centrifuge to separate out the red blood cells, then inject the plasma into the sickest patients.
It worked, the patients improved…for a while. Then the symptoms would reoccur, and the patients would be at Death’s door again. Plasma treatments were only temporary, and there wasn’t an unlimited supply of recovered patients who could donate.
So I’m somewhat skeptical when I hear of “plasma recoveries” now. I can’t help but wonder if the treatment will prove to be temporary.
~VOW
I recently pulled out Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” again.
It’s set in the future, only it was the future of the early noughties so everyone uses CD-ROMs and emails their friends, while GM animals are further along than we are now.
Don’t recommend this book to the conspiracy types, because it’s a typical Margaret Atwood dystopia. The pandemic was made in a lab, meant to destroy mankind.
But it’s a great read, exciting and sad, it keeps you on the edge of your seat. You race through it.
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"The Plague, Albert Camus
“The Road”, Cormack McCarthy
“On the Beach”, Neville Shute
“Waiting for the Barbarians”, J M Coetzee
I’m going to recommend something a little different, but very relevant to the time. It’s called Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information by Paul Offit. Offit has written a number of books on medicine for the general public, and in particular, a number on vaccination (he’s not only pro, he developed the current rotavirus vaccine). He’s a scientist who can make science both understandable and interesting for lay people. He’s not quite Stephen Jay Gould, but he is in that ballpark. His books are all fascinating.
I am currently reading Bad Advice myself right now, and I have read nearly all his books-- the only ones I have not read are the ones released in the last two years or so.
Another excellent, older book by Offit is Vaccinated, which is partly a biography of Maurice Hilleman, the man responsible for nearly all of the current childhood vaccines currently used. It’s his personal story, but it is also a detailed discussion of how all the vaccines were developed. It doesn’t spare details, so if you don’t want to read about animal experimentation, it’s not for you, but I am generally squeamish about that stuff, and I loved this book.
You’ll understand why vaccines take so long to develop-- basically, you can’t speed up a rat’s reproductive cycle, nor the incubation time of the virus itself, and you have to go through several life cycles of the disease causing agent, and your experimental subjects, so you sometimes just have to wait.
The Stand by Stephan King is a good long read about a flue virus that kills 99.9% of the population. It’s good Stephan King writing while in his prime. I was looking forward to the new mini series on CBS All Access but they canceled it until the fall because it was deemed to dark to show in the middle of a pandemic. The book is so much better than the four part series with Molly Ringwald because it goes into a lot more detail about what would happen during a extiction level pandemic.