This review is written in March 2021 (by an MD who studies epidemiology) with the Covid-19 pandemic still raging world-wide. I imagine that people without a science or medicine background may be thinking more about viruses than they ever have before. If this is you, this little book provides an easy to read, gentle introduction to the extremely complex field of virology. You will learn how viruses are not all bad, how they are key to the survival of the planet's ecosystem, how they came to be, and of course, how they cause disease. You'll get a sense of how they are made, the differences between DNA and RNA viruses (and why that matters), and how some manage to evade our immune systems. The language is clear and non-technical.
This is not a book for people with academic training in university, nursing school, medical school, etc. looking for technical details. You won't learn about capsid assembly, nor anything about how antigen presenting cells or Toll-like receptors work. If that's you, this book will be too simple.
In turn, that's good news for everyone else. You need no previous knowledge about biology to understand this book. While there are a few terms that will make more sense to you if you have had high school or college biology, you really won't need it.
The only downside is that the book does not touch at all on how our immune response works. That's unfortunate, because the authors clearly know how to present concepts simply for a non-technical audience.
This book was written in 2018 and the field has progressed exponentially since then. It's still useful for a broad overview, but it needs an update. So there is less up-to-date information about things like HIV anti-virals, treatment for chronic Hepatitis C, and most dramatically of course, Covid-19 since the causative agent -- SARS-CoV-2-- was not in existence at the time of writing.
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Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
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