Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata (PDF)

Description

Veteran journalist Gina Kolata’s Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It presents a fascinating look at true story of the world’s deadliest disease.In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic felled the young and healthy virtually overnight. An estimated forty million people died as the epidemic raged. Children were left orphaned and families were devastated. As many American soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu as were killed in battle during World War I. And no area of the globe was safe. Eskimos living in remote outposts in the frozen tundra were sickened and killed by the flu in such numbers that entire villages were wiped out.Scientists have recently rediscovered shards of the flu virus frozen in Alaska and preserved in scraps of tissue in a government warehouse. Gina Kolata, an acclaimed reporter for The New York Times, unravels the mystery of this lethal virus with the high drama of a great adventure story. Delving into the history of the flu and previous epidemics, detailing the science and the latest understanding of this mortal disease, Kolata addresses the prospects for a great epidemic recurring, and, most important, what can be done to prevent it.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐First of all, Gina Kolata is marvolous scicene writer. I have been reading her articles in the New York Times for years. This book gives a perspective on the 1918 flu that is defferent from other books I have read about the 1918 flu. She writes, basically a summary of the flu, and then writes about the lack of historians writings about it because they thought is was so horrible. But then she writes about the great swine flu debacle during President Ford’s Adminstration and the implications of swine flu in general. Then she tell the story about a long ago decades atempt to revover the actual 1918 flu virus and map its genome and ry to discover why was this flu SO deadly. The first attempt was a failure because it was to early in medical history and technology. The second attempt had two paths going simultaneously to find the 1918 virus. One was started in the “present day” and the other was a follow up to the long ago decades attempt to recover the actual 1918 flu virus. Would either path win? If one path did win, which was it and what were the results of the win? Read the book for “The Rest of the Story.”By the way the first must read book about the 1918 flu isAlfred W. Crosby’s “America’s Forgotten Pandemic” (https://smile.amazon.com/Americas-Forgotten-Pandemic-Influenza-1918-dp-0521541751/dp/0521541751).The second must be read book is this reviewed book, “Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It” by Gina Kolata.The third must read book is “The Great Influenza” by John M. Berry (https://www.amazon.com/Great-Influenza-Deadliest-Pandemic-History/dp/0143036491).Both Gina Kolota and John Berry reference Crosby’s book. John Barry’s books also references Kolata’s book. But references do not tell you the referenced book. They tell you a sentence or a few. Each of these three books take the information from the previous books and builds on them. Book 2 builds on Book 1. Book 3 Builds on Book 1 and 2. Unfortunately I did not realize that I have read book three, then book 2. I have book 1 an will be starting it soon. I found that book 3 referenced book 2 early in the book. WTF! Then it reference book 1. WTF again? So I bought Book 1 from Amazon and will start reading it after my current read unless something else comes in higher on the RADAR. Then re-read book 2 and then re-read book 3. No prob Bob. I have read many books I have several times and have always found something new in them everytime.

⭐For those who are unfamiliar with how influenza functions, both in the body and in society, this book is a good introduction. It’s history of the 1918 pandemic is also very good, albeit succinct, given the scope of the material. Crosby, who wrote the original history back in the 1980s, is referenced often.The early efforts to find and interpret the genetic code are also fascinating to me, especially as biomolecular and genetic science have advanced significantly in 22 years. (For example, there is a reference made to a gene editor – a predecessor to CRISPr – but it is made as an aside, rather than reflecting the significant role gene editors have today in genetic analysis.) It was no doubt breaking ground in 1999, revealing the state of the art for the layperson, but now it serves as a fascinating snapshot to a piece of the scientific history that helped advance us into the Covid-19 era of scientific inquiry, when influenza virus is still a concern, but one of now several different zoonotic viruses about which we must be vigilant.I deducted a star because the book takes a couple of – in my opinion – unnecessarily long tangents, even for 1999. One involved 1976 swine flu scare. A brief overview would have sufficed, and overview that put the swine flu in clearer perpective at the outset. The reader spends the first half of the book wondering what does this swine flu have to do wirh 1918 H1N1?There is also unnecessary emphasis placed on a mission to retrieve tissue from 1918 victims believed to be preserved in permafrost on Svalbard. My suspicion is that the mission, being contemporaneous with the author’s research, seemed more important at the time than it actually proved to be. It could have been described in a half a chapter or less.The area where the book stands out, in my opinion, is in describing the scramble to understand the 1997 bird flu. Here, there is a clear throughline to our own era of trying to capture zoonotic transfer before it becomes a pandemic. It was prevented in 1997, but not in 2020. There are lessons in the comparison from which we can learn.

⭐The story of the 1918 flu epidemic is shocking and bald: more people died in one winter than had been killed in the entire First World War.Not far from my house in South-East England is a churchyard in which there are 300-year-old graves. But about a third of the plot is given over to the graves of Canadian servicemen, all of whom died in their late teens in the Winter of 1918/1919. This was after the war had ended, and these boys died not at the hands of the enemy but from influenza.This excellent book homes in on the detective race to secure samples of the 1918 flu and identify the genetic code of the virus that caused it. There are many other threads that the author could have followed, such as the appalling scale of human tragedy, the technical details of the virological study of the flu, and the shock value of our potential vulnerability to future outbreaks (and to diseases like SARS). But Gina Kolata focuses on the scientific race to isolate and identify the virus, and this makes for a page-turning thriller.The book lacks structure, though, and becomes increasingly scrambled. In tracing the parallel careers and scientific studies of the protagonists, Kolata attempts chronological jumps that fail. Added to this, the editing of the book is sloppy and it contains howlers that are so illogical that I suspect them to have been introduced by a confused editor rather than put there by the author herself.Don’t let this put you off. Read this book. It deals with an epidemic that has been ignored and downplayed to an astonishing degree, and it delivers pace, clear explanation and much that fascinates and excites.The 1918 flu is the poor relation in our dire human history of plagues, perhaps because it fell at a time when people were already bone-weary of loss and bad news. This book redresses this balance, and I look forward to buying the next edition which will I expect repair some of the flaws in the first run and will certainly update this account of a rapidly-developing field.

⭐Quite a readable book – a sort of scientific whodunnit – except we are left hanging. The book ends describing ongoing research so why not hold off publishing for a year or so until more information comes to light? I agree with the other reviewer about some cattiness regarding Kirsty Duncan – – was there any need to mention her looks or effect on other men in her team? So we are presented with a book that describes the 1918 Flu epidemic on the USA but pretty much ignores anywhere else! In the end a frustrating book.

⭐Good condition.Very interesting read.Prompt delivery. What more can one ask?

⭐Like clockwork

⭐My Grandparents went through the 1918 flu and never talked about it. it seems that was the way with most people of that era. So to read about it was interesting and terrifying thinking of all they went through. We at least had the hope of a vaccine. They had nothing and this flu hit young adults in their prime and children. No wonder the governments of today tried to quarantine people and mandated vaccines. The hospitals were overwhelmed in 1918 and in our time as well. Fascinating read that is easy to understand. Everyone needs to read this book.

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