Living with Enza – Mark Honigsbaum ****

There was something chilling about reading Mark Honigsbaum’s account of the 1918 flu pandemic at a time when the world is threatened with another pandemic, of a similar type of influenza (at the time of writing, the 2009 swine flu outbreak has recently been declared a pandemic). There are distinct parallels – in 1918 there was a mild early outbreak before a crushing attack in the winter that killed millions worldwide.

What’s fascinating in Honigsbaum’s account is the way he intertwines the story of the flu pandemic with the story of the First World War, an era in history that for my generation was largely forgotten (we studied the Second World War in school, but not the first). It’s essential to make this link as it has, at least in part, to explain why the flu pandemic was given such scant regard at the time – there is very little written up about it – and it also adds pathos as we see these two terrible killers side by side. It also seems to be the case that, despite being called Spanish Flu back then, that the outbreak may well have come to Europe from the USA along with troops fighting in the war.

There is now a certain amount of irony about the last part of the book, which looks at how things might develop with a future pandemic, basing it on the bird flu scare that was prevalent when the book was written. Oddly, one thing Honigsbaum didn’t foresee was that we would have a mild outbreak first, paralleling the 1918 situation, and so giving the authorities more breathing space than he thought we would get.

Even so, the book, with its vivid descriptions of the impact of flu and the associated bacterial infections that tend to piggy-back on it makes grim and worrying reading. If the book has a fault, it’s a touch dry and does perhaps labour some of the details, but it is, nonetheless, a timely warning of what could be around the corner. It’s difficult to encourage people to buy books that are going to depress them – but this should be the exception to the rule.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

Search This Blog