Flu, Gina Kolata
Flu, Gina Kolata
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Flu

Author: Gina Kolata

Narrator: Gina Kolata

Abridged: 6 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/16/2001


Synopsis

A national bestseller, the fast-paced and gripping account of the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918 from acclaimed science journalist Gina Kolata, now featuring a new epilogue about avian flu.

When we think of plagues, we think of AIDS, Ebola, anthrax spores, and, of course, the Black Death. But in 1918 the Great Flu Epidemic killed an estimated forty million people virtually overnight. If such a plague returned today, taking a comparable percentage of the US population with it, 1.5 million Americans would die.

In Flu, 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. From Alaska to Norway, from the streets of Hong Kong to the corridors of the White House, Kolata tracks the race to recover the live pathogen and probes the fear that has impelled government policy.

A gripping work of science writing, Flu addresses the prospects for a great epidemic’s recurrence and considers what can be done to prevent it.

About Gina Kolata

Gina Kolata is a science writer for the New York Times and the author of five previous books, including Ultimate Fitness, Clone, and the national bestseller Flu. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Lynne on May 21, 2013

This book was just excellent and that's all that needs to be said. I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in medical history and likes Germ Theory. Why I didn't study science at university instead of the arts is beyond me.......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth on December 18, 2015

Unfortunately I found the writing horribly awkward and clunky. And worst of all for me, extremely repetitive and long-winded. I'm fairly certain the book could have been at least a third shorter if the redundancies, unnecessary re-explanations, barely related tangents, and overly wordy sentences had......more

Goodreads review by Betsy on April 04, 2020

The title is a little bit of a misnomer. It's not so much a history of the pandemic -- just a portion of the first chapter is devoted to that -- as a history of the efforts of scientists subsequent to the actual pandemic to understand where it came from and why it was so lethal. As many as 100 milli......more

Goodreads review by Jose on December 09, 2016

A good book on the deadly, ill named, spanish flu because today nobody knows where exactly this pandemia begun. The book is devoted to the history,epidemiology and investigation of this letal virus,that killed over 50 million humans arroun the world in the 1918 pandemia ,the most letal after the blac......more