Customer Reviews

Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution Of People And Plagues (Helix Book)

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

 

 

Yellow Fever, Black Goddess is interesting and anecdotal. Its highly readable by someone with only the fundamentals of parasitology and epidemiology interested in modern day epidemics.

Wills takes the reader through a survey of the world's primary epidemic diseases explaining their origin, morphology, the history of their study and cure. In addition, he addresses some Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) such as syphilis and AIDS. A major thesis is the constant war of adoption taking place genetically between parasites, disease organisms and human beings. At a macro-level, humanity is changing its environment in the name of progress and to eliminate and control diseases. At the micro-level, parasites and diseases are rapidly mutating themselves to find new hosts in this new environment. On occasion, the resulting mutation is lethal to the host and becomes an epidemic (the modern term for plague).

Wills style is highly readable including several personal stories to illustrate his points. Reading this book does require at least undergraduate knowledge of biology and genetics. However, the author clearly explains the more complex aspects of the subject. The discussion on cholera is particularly interesting and well done.

Wills book does suffer from a lack of coordination and the discussion is uneven. The major sections address the individual diseases and parasites well. However, they are not well organized together as a whole. I imagine there is a connection in the discussion between viral, bacterial, and multicellular parasite contagion, but I failed to fully see the progression. For example, while titillating, I failed to see the connection between syphilis and malaria. Some subject diseases are better covered then others. Also, some diseases are approached in a different fashion from others. This made it difficult to compare and contrast all the diseases discussed in the book. For example, the discussion of cholera is heavily weighted toward morphology and includes personal anecdotes. Willis's discussion of syphilis,. is primarily on the historical origin of the disease. What about a personal anecdote?

Yellow Fever, Black Goddess is a good introduction to modern epidemics for the college-level reader. It discusses several organisms found in the world today that can quickly flourish into epidemics or are epidemic. However, the broad theme of the book is not as well handled as the individual plagues.

Wills does not provide an exhaustive review of diseases, but selects illustrative examples. I find this preferable to a less in-depth discussion of a large number of diseases. His incorporation of personal experiences, and theoretical speculations on disease and diversity add breadth and depth to this book. I thought it was excellent.

While the subject of the book is fascinating, and there is some interesting information in the book, the book would greatly benefit from substantial editing, with emphasis on writing style.
The book suffers from a number of writing faults. If it's a book about "the coevolution of people and plagues" (its subtitle), why are the author's world travels constantly thrown at the reader? "One of my most searing memories is of being surrounded on a street in Hyderabad by a crowd of lepers.... I reached Vellore, a cheerful and relatively clean market town, after a hectic 120-kilometre bus ride from Madras...."
If the reader makes it past the travelogue, the reader will still have to get through the prose and commas. "Yet the AIDS virus, despite its fearsome aspects, has had just as much difficulty in spreading through the human population as syphilis or typhoid, and has had to make equally dramatic compromises in order to retain its ability to spread" is a typical sentence.
The subject would be much better served if the author could stay on topic and the book was presented as an adventure to be discovered and enjoyed instead of making each sentence (and the book itself) a puzzle to be penetrated.

This book i highly recommend! Very interesting about the world around us and how we survive such diseases. It is worth reading!

I needed this book for class and, of course, Amazon comes to the rescue with exactly what I need at nearly no cost to me! It was shipped in a timely manner and it's been a great read so far. I'm using this book for a required public health course on the history of public health. So while it is required, this book is very much a great compliment to what I'm learning.

_Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues_ could have been a penetrating examination of the relationship between humanity and disease. Christopher Willis certainly had fertile ground to work, but the book ends up being a dull and pedantic trudge that fails to bring the best of the academic or the popular to the reader.

The text wanders through evolutionary biology and human history without any real sense of direction. The biographies and personal histories read like indifferent `human interest' stories injected into an otherwise uninteresting science news broadcast.

I bought this book because I was looking for something about the epidemiology of yellow fever. There is nothing about yellow fever in this book -- it is mentioned only three times, in passing -- and even less about some putative "black goddess" of cholera, who may or may not have ever been worshipped.

Catchy title, though.

Much of the information is out of date. Patarroyo's malaria vaccine, for example, was a failure. Zimbabwe is no longer an attractive tourist destination.

The argument that tropical diseases have to make compromises to travel in temperate climes is hardly news. All organisms have to make compromises.

In any case, as regards fears that tropical diseases will spread to temperate climes -- not a popular issue when this book was published in 1996 -- the prophylactic is not to attack global warming but to make people rich. Rich people don't get the plague, no matter how warm they are.

I am a student working on a project/report for this book and sadly i had volutarily purchased it thinking i was in for a good book. Not the case. Although it is informative, most people aren't university professors reading up on their evolution. It is DULL and i ended up reading about 2/3 of the book because the project was due soon and you probably dont care, anyway i have since read the whole book and it bored me into writing this. Wills absolutely does not succeed in fulfilling its title. So if you are doing a project DO NOT PICK THIS BOOK. NEVAR. EVAR. sry Chris Wills...u did it to yourself...