"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Thursday, January 14, 2021

The Great Influenza - The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (John M. Barry, 2004)

(546 pages)

Book club selection (via PJ; session held (via Zoom) January 10, 2021).

Timely re-read of a very good book first read in 2013, here's what I wrote then.

Notes from this time:

  • Consistently states that masks do not work.  2018 updated afterword misses the mark on work from home. Feels there is a last mile problem. Otherwise, seems pretty accurate.
  • Interesting that no one can come up with a cure for influenza.
  • We run into Jon Snow on page 27.
  • Woodrow Wilson, propaganda, getting the country into war, and then total war.
  • The press as an accomplice of government.
  • Armies and plagues; the extent to which World War I drove the outcome here. Troop movements within the US and around the world. The need to suppress information. Spanish flu!
  • India with 20 million deaths, yet barely a ripple of notice.

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