This is not fun reading, but it’s necessary—one can only hope that it drives more effective surveillance and rapid response...
Vibrio cholerae was once a species of marine bacteria attached to some plankton in the coastal wetlands of the Bay of Bengal. In grim detail, science journalist Shah (The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, 2010, etc.) demonstrates how it became the global source of horrendous deaths and how the story of cholera is paradigmatic of how pandemics happen.
Cholera emerged in the early 1800s after the East India Company began to fill in and settle the wetlands. Disease might occur if a fisherman swallowed some brackish water, a direct transmission from the vibrio to a human. But to make the jump to human-to-human transmission, the vibrio changed. It adapted ways to form colonies, making it harder to dislodge from the human gut, and it developed a toxin that flushes all the fluids from the body, causing death by dehydration. Still, cholera might have stayed local except for other 19th-century developments: steamships and newly dug canals and waterways moved goods and people rapidly across land and sea, creating new waves of infection while also swelling the populations of cities, which lacked clean drinking water and proper waste disposal. By the 1830s, cholera was devastating Paris, London, and New York, exacerbated by the arrogance of medical elites who swore by the miasma theory of disease. Then, add political corruption after the cause was known: city contractors asked to supply clean water but substituting foul; government officials who would deny the existence of disease, so as not to discourage business. The ingredients for pandemics remain potent in a jet age with deforested lands, ever growing cities, the consumption of bush meat and other exotic wild cuisine (from illegal “wet markets”), antibiotic resistance, inadequate disease surveillance, and destructive cultural attitudes, ranging from abject fear to blame to indifference. Shah covers all of these aspects in vivid prose and through revealing eyewitness accounts.
This is not fun reading, but it’s necessary—one can only hope that it drives more effective surveillance and rapid response to tomorrow’s plagues.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-12288-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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