The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is a lot of amazing information in this huge tome, and it took me three weeks to get through, but it was worth it. It could have used a firmer editing hand though. Both the chronology of infectious diseases and the diseases themselves were divided into chapters in ways I failed to understand. Additionally, given the large amount of extremely useful information provided by this book, it would have moved the book along to edit down every individual thought every patient and every doctor ever had, every description of every little leaf in the jungle the disease emerged. I could basically write an entire book review about any chapter, it's so overwhelming.

There was a lot of information about AIDS provided in the second half of the book.

Some of the themes of the book are sleuthing the origins of novel pathogen outbreaks, scientific hubris, and illness containment fails.

I recently watched an interview with Dr. Ian Crozier, an ebola survivor, and I was amazed at how much I understood that I'd only just learned from the information in this book.

I read this for some insight into the novel virus outbreaks like our cures coronavirus outbreak but I definitely gained a great deal more from reading this. And what a great ending!

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