A History of the World in Six Plagues..., Edna Bonhomme
A History of the World in Six Plagues..., Edna Bonhomme
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A History of the World in Six Plagues
How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to Covid-19

Author: Edna Bonhomme

Narrator: Veronique Olin

Unabridged: 10 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/25/2025

Synopsis

A deeply reported, insightful, and literary account of humankind’s battles with epidemic disease, and their outsized role in deepening inequality along racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines—in the vein of Medical Apartheid and Killing the Black Body.

Epidemic diseases enter the world by chance, but they become catastrophic by human design.

With clear-eyed research and lush prose, A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by and gone on to further expand the racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides we allow to fester in times of good health.

Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme’s examination of humanity’s disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel shocking truths about the patterns of discrimination in the face of disease. Based on in-depth research and cultural analysis, Bonhomme explores Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola, and COVID-19 amidst the backdrop of unequal public policy. But much more than a remarkable history, A History of the World in Six Plagues is also a rising call for change.

About Edna Bonhomme

Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, culture writer, and book critic whose work has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, Esquire, Frieze magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Washington Post, and more. She is coeditor of After Sex, a collection of essays, poems, and short stories. She earned a PhD from Princeton University, a master’s degree from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree from Reed College. She previously held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Camargo Foundation, Baldwin for the Arts, and Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency Program at Maison Dora Maar. Edna is a recipient of the Robert Silvers Foundation Grant for Works in Progress and the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Grant.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Brandi on November 04, 2024

This book didn’t really tell a history of plagues, rather essays about how plagues have affected specific populations were affected by each plague - what were the leaders of countries affected doing, what preventions and cures were found, and she finalizes with her own recommendations. I feel like t......more

Goodreads review by BethK on December 01, 2024

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review. This was not the book I expected to read. I expected more information of how each of those 6 plagues effected their victims, what sorts of care they got, and what percentage died, along with any public......more

Goodreads review by Dan on January 22, 2025

My thanks to both NetGalley and Atria/One Signal Publishers for an advance copy of this book that looks at how the polices that medical and governments put into place to deal with epidemics and outbreaks, show the lack of lessons learned from past incidents, making things sometimes much worse, and h......more

Goodreads review by Ula on January 11, 2025

I think the editors did a great disservice to this book by giving it a title that is clearly evocative of another recently published and well-received work, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. Aside from the title, these two books have very little in common. "Pathogenesis" is a ty......more

Goodreads review by Ethan on March 22, 2025

The history of humanity is intertwined with bacteria and viruses. Most death has always come from some kind of infection. And we can learn a lot about human history from how humans have approached infections. In A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, fr......more

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