Customer Reviews

Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I enjoyed Dread - it presents a clear and convincing argument that many of our fears are disproportionate to the risks they pose. Touching on many topics from the black plague, to AIDS, to obesity, Dread offers in-depth information in a way that is accessible and understandable to me. The book explains why our lifestyle, and everything from the news, to health officials and the CDC often drive irrational fears about disease and our environment.

This is a great book filled with great insights on a great subject. We don't realize how much extra baggage we bring to the subject of disease in our public discourse---but Alcabes does and offers perceptive perspectives on the subject. . As a mother of children with autism, I was particularly interested in Alcabes' take on autism, his view that we fear autistic people because they aren't able to recognize other people's points of view and thus reaffirm those individuals. Also Alcabes argues that we fear the autistic because they don't fit into our world of multi-tasking and instant communication. Great insight!

This book is dense, often difficult to read, and sometimes suffers from serious gaps in logic.

If you can get through that, though, it has a lot of really interesting things to say.

He does a terrific job of exploring how our cultural use of the epidemic concept is used as a form of social control and commentary. Many of our current "epidemics" are speculations about the future, not actual current crises. (We have plenty of actual current problems, but we often don't call them epidemics.) It consists almost entirely of forecasting future harm. And since future harm is unknowable and uncontrollable, this lends itself to pretty simple social control.

He also does a fantastic job of criticising germ theory. His basic concept is that germ theory is correct, but misleading. Disease and epidemic emerge when a number of different factors converge. Germs are only one of those factors. Our obsession with getting the "bad guys" (germs) has led us to disregard those other factors. Disease isn't simple.

This book would benefit from a rewrite, some quality editing, and perhaps a second author to add some other perspectives. But the ideas in it are definitely worth pondering.

Hearing Alcabes on the WNYC radio show The Takeaway this morning (re Cholera in Haiti), reminded me how brilliant this book is. Alcabes gives us a way to understand disease in the context of our social and political systems. It's simultaneously comforting and disturbing. Most of all it's worth reading.

History, science, and health issues blend in DREAD: HOW FEAR AND FANTASY HAVE FUELED EPIDEMICS FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO AVIAN FLU. Humans have lived in dread of epidemics for all of history - yet today deaths from epidemics are rare in the developed world. The evidences of epidemics in Western society and their lasting effects makes for a key survey any health or social sciences collection, in particular, will relish.

I highly recommend this book for both the professional and the layman.It is well researched with literary, historical and medical references and very well written. Philip Alcabes presents his points of view in a clear and convincing manner.

This book is a must read. Philip Alcabes is an extremely gifted writer. In a world filled with potential deadly viruses (Swine Flu just the most recent example....), this book offers brilliant insight into a very relevant topic.

Philip Alcabes is a public scholar. By that I mean a cross-disciplinary professor who reaches beyond the ivy walls to make his ideas accessible to those outside of the academy. Anyone who is familiar with Dr. Alcabes' essays in The American Scholar and The Chronicle of Higher Education knows he routinely questions generally accepted wisdom. Dread is Dr. Alcabes' first book. I approached it the way I approach all his writings, wondering which sacred cows of mine he will slay. As a Jew, I was riveted by his discussion of the plague and the belief that Jews were responsible for the epidemic, perhaps because so many of them were physicians who knew a lot about poisons. As a nutritionist, I was equally interested in Dr. Alcabes' examination of obesity--not the obesity epidemic per se, but of the people whose careers depend on it. Dr Alcabes never fails to disappoint! If you dread having your beliefs challenged, don't read this book. But if you want to learn about the intersections of history, geography, religion, economics, mores and disease, Dread is just what the doctor ordered.

I have to disagree with the other reviews- this book is poorly written with many run-on sentences that lead to nowhere. He does put in various pieces of historical and scientific data that are interesting, but at the end of most of his sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, I was left wondering what his overall point was beyond simple generalizations.

The interesting part about epidemics to me is society's ability to take half-truths about science and warp them to serve their own purposes. This seemed to be what he was getting at, at times. However, to slight "germ theory" as a main culprit in sensationalizing epidemics is completely off-base. Without germ theory, most of us wouldn't be writing these opinions, we'd be dead. It's how politicians, leaders, the media etc. distort this theory; not a problem with the theory itself.
And to somehow imply that we shouldn't be preaching safe sex because syphilis has peaks and valleys that we don't understand despite no change in sexual activity... really?

This is a really interesting subject and I really wanted to enjoy this book, but overall it was painful to read.