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Two Books on Pandemic Disease
Jan. 7th, 2011 12:29 pmSo, my dear sister sent me two books for Christmas:
1. Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
2. John Barry, The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history (about the 1918 "Spanish Flu")
Number one is derived from the author's doctoral dissertation in American History at Yale, a signal for many dry and boring books; number two is a meticulously researched work, but one written by a journalist who began as a football coach. Number one was celebrated, but in mainly academic circles; number two received widspread popular acclaim.
But surprisingly, number one is much the better and more readable work of non-fiction. Maybe it's because Fenn left her grad program at Yale to spend eight years working as an auto mechanic in Durham, NC, but she's a MUCH better writer, and manages to balance deep scholarship and detail with lively writing, and understanding of why pandemics matter (aside from the inherent coolness of mass death, she has an historian/anthropologist's concerns for the social fallout of pandemics). Barry spends a lot of the book talking about the development of scientific medicine in the US, with its centers at Johns Hopkins and the Rockefeller Institute, which was fairly interesting to me, but he never managed to tie this thread of the book closely enough to the actual flu outbreak. His treatment of that was rather brief and almost cursory, with a focus only on one place (Philadelphia) and no characters who we could really get a grip on. (We got oodles about a guy named Welch who was pretty boring (despite founding Johns Hopkins medical school) and did nothing in the pandemic except catch the flu and stay in bed for a long time recuperating.) And his language and tone were needlessly melodramatic. Each chapter once the flu started (since the book begins when Welch was born in like 1860) began or ended with, "It was influenza, only influenza." I was considering making up a song.
Now, do you think we could get Elizabeth Fenn to write about the Spanish Flu? No? Well, I think I am going to look for her forthcoming book about the Mandan people of the Dakotas. And I am taking Barry's book about the 1923 New Orleans flood off my wish list.
1. Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
2. John Barry, The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history (about the 1918 "Spanish Flu")
Number one is derived from the author's doctoral dissertation in American History at Yale, a signal for many dry and boring books; number two is a meticulously researched work, but one written by a journalist who began as a football coach. Number one was celebrated, but in mainly academic circles; number two received widspread popular acclaim.
But surprisingly, number one is much the better and more readable work of non-fiction. Maybe it's because Fenn left her grad program at Yale to spend eight years working as an auto mechanic in Durham, NC, but she's a MUCH better writer, and manages to balance deep scholarship and detail with lively writing, and understanding of why pandemics matter (aside from the inherent coolness of mass death, she has an historian/anthropologist's concerns for the social fallout of pandemics). Barry spends a lot of the book talking about the development of scientific medicine in the US, with its centers at Johns Hopkins and the Rockefeller Institute, which was fairly interesting to me, but he never managed to tie this thread of the book closely enough to the actual flu outbreak. His treatment of that was rather brief and almost cursory, with a focus only on one place (Philadelphia) and no characters who we could really get a grip on. (We got oodles about a guy named Welch who was pretty boring (despite founding Johns Hopkins medical school) and did nothing in the pandemic except catch the flu and stay in bed for a long time recuperating.) And his language and tone were needlessly melodramatic. Each chapter once the flu started (since the book begins when Welch was born in like 1860) began or ended with, "It was influenza, only influenza." I was considering making up a song.
Now, do you think we could get Elizabeth Fenn to write about the Spanish Flu? No? Well, I think I am going to look for her forthcoming book about the Mandan people of the Dakotas. And I am taking Barry's book about the 1923 New Orleans flood off my wish list.