Customer Reviews

Plague and Pestilence: Deadly Diseases That Changed the World (True Stories)

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An account of the role of infectious disease in human history... It is brief enough to give an overview that is difficult to glean from more ponderous academic works. The language is vivid and stark, as befits the subject matter. Some of the statistics given are just mind-boggling - e.g. during the major wars of the nineteenth century, more soldiers died of diseases such as typhus than were killed by battle wounds. The plague in Constantinople in 514 AD killed 10,000 persons a day... The sheer weight of anecdotes in the book is another positive feature. All of them are interesting, some are amusing in a morbid sort of way: for example, the tale of Mongolian invaders struck down by plague and loading the infectious corpses of their own comrades onto catapults and hurling them over the walls of a beseiged city... And from modern times there is an account (and two interesting photos) of the Ebola outbreak in Zaire. This book is obviously written for world-aware teenagers but I as an adult researching an article found it fascinating and informative.

While this book did have interesting information, it was arranged so willy nilly I had a hard time gleaning anything from it. You'd read a little about a disease in one section then have to go to 3 more sections to get the full scoop. Also the author spent too much ink writing about the silly ways people treated or thought about disease in times past with a chapter on this subject between almost every other chapter. OK. They did it wrong in the past. Now get on with the treatments and other helpful information such as the path to finding treatments that worked. I read it to my 11 year old and she thought it was rediculously confusing and so did I. I suggest 12 Diseases That Changed Our World instead.