Customer Reviews

Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS

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At 165 pages, the book is concise and to the point, laying out the human story of the SARS epidemic directly and forcefully. The book is organized temporally, and geographically, starting with the source of the infection in Guandong Province, China, and following up with a description of events in Hong Kong. The book describes well the milestone events of the epidemic, particularly the events in Hong Kong: the index patient, the Metropole Hotel, the toll on health care workers at the Prince of Wales Hospital, and the investigation of the spread of the disease at the Amoy Gardens apartments. The book describes the global spread of the disease and the decisive actions of the WHO that, in the end, may have saved many lives by getting information and warnings to the public, and organizing a large research team to find the organism. The deleterious actions of the Chinese government are described in an unbiased fashion. The race to find the organism is described in a compelling manner. The best recommmendation I have for the book, however, is that it is short, informative, and easy to read. The book is interesting, and takes only two or three hours to read.

The author is so boring I literally fell asleep while reading the 3rd page of this book!! I thought it would be filled with interesting insights into this killer 21st century disease, but he spends way too much time blaming everyone on the planet but the SARS pathogen itself for the evolution of this plague. He writes with far too much intellectual bravado and machoism for my taste. There is very little substance in this book; the author may know something about science but his writing does not reflect this at all!

My dad wrote this and I read it i think its great its full of detail and intrestng tidbits even though this is adult lit i still loved it

P.S my dad really did write this