America's Forgotten Pandemic : The Influenza of 1918

Rating:
Summary: What do YOU know about the flu of 1918??
Review: The title of this exceptional book is the understatement of the 20th Century. This was not your average killer flu! The handful of other killer flu's of the century (defined as 20,000+ deaths, a small fraction of the number who died in 1918), the kind with which we're all familiar, look mighty miniscule beside this virus that took its victims in a most painful and violent manner. This pandemic, which killed more soldiers than World War I, seems to have completely escaped the attention of America's under-informed and virus-obsessed media today. So much so that Crosby devotes a chapter to the fact that this major event--which, by the way, has never been fully explained--disappeared from the collective conscience as soon as it was over. Some of this undoubtedly was due to (1) no television, and (2) very little radio due to the war, and (3) the war. Because I assure you, if anything even remotely of this magnitude happened today, there would be absolute mass panic and hysteria: the economy might well come crashing to the ground for good. This mysterious and deadly virus remains unique in several ways, including the weird fact that it mostly attacked and killed people in the prime of their lives (20s and 30s). So devastated was port-city Philadelphia that coffins were stacked in the street. Coffin-makers naturally took advantage and price-gouged to the extent the US government had to intervene (kind of like gas immedately shooting up to $5 a gallon on September 11th in Indianapolis, Indiana). And on and on. There is nothing about this subject or this book that isn't shocking. As for the data, well, that's how good academic research is done, for crying out loud. If the author hadn't included the statistics, everyone would have denounced this as shoddy pseudoscience. Moreover, the startling mortality data are fascinating in their own right. An exceptionally well-written, riveting read.

Rating:
Summary: first rate history but far from perfect
Review: This is by far the best book on the subject so far, and it's really quite good. But some of the research is a little superficial (for example, nearly all the material on Philadelphia, the hardest hit city in the country, comes from a single newspaper, when at least 7 or 8 were being published at the time).

Rating:
Summary: Caught Between a History of the Era and of the Flu
Review: Why did the Spanish flu kill 25 million people worldwide? Why did it kill those in the prime of life more efficiently than the usual flu victims, the very young or the very old? Where did it go after its nine month run through the world in 1918-1919? Can it strike again? Why has it been largely forgotten by historians? Engaging questions all, and Alfred Crosby asks them and to a greater or lesser extent seeks to answer them. Still, this book is less than it could be, written for too much of its length as if he were keeping his narrative powers deliberately in check. For those that doubt he is capable of powerful writing, the last chapter stands as rebuttal, with its tribute to Katherine Anne Porter -- to whom the book is dedicated -- and an adult's recollection of how the flu brought home at age seven the early realization that "life was not a perpetual present, and that even tomorrow would be part of the past, and that for all my days and years to come I too must one day die." I'd like to have seen more of those personal close-ups of the impact of the flu instead of the grim numbers in Philadelphia, then the grim numbers in San Francisco, then the grim numbers in Alaska. It is as if Crosby wanted to write a history of the era as it was lived with the flu and wound up writing a journal of morbidity and mortality, and the virus sleuthing that followed. He aimed for a vision and achieved a laboratory slide -- no mean accomplishment, but not, I think, what we or he were finally after.

Rating:
Summary: Caught Between a History of the Era and of the Flu
Review: Why did the Spanish flu kill 25 million people worldwide? Why did it kill those in the prime of life more efficiently than the usual flu victims, the very young or the very old? Where did it go after its nine month run through the world in 1918-1919? Can it strike again? Why has it been largely forgotten by historians? Engaging questions all, and Alfred Crosby asks them and to a greater or lesser extent seeks to answer them. Still, this book is less than it could be, written for too much of its length as if he were keeping his narrative powers deliberately in check. For those that doubt he is capable of powerful writing, the last chapter stands as rebuttal, with its tribute to Katherine Anne Porter -- to whom the book is dedicated -- and an adult's recollection of how the flu brought home at age seven the early realization that "life was not a perpetual present, and that even tomorrow would be part of the past, and that for all my days and years to come I too must one day die." I'd like to have seen more of those personal close-ups of the impact of the flu instead of the grim numbers in Philadelphia, then the grim numbers in San Francisco, then the grim numbers in Alaska. It is as if Crosby wanted to write a history of the era as it was lived with the flu and wound up writing a journal of morbidity and mortality, and the virus sleuthing that followed. He aimed for a vision and achieved a laboratory slide -- no mean accomplishment, but not, I think, what we or he were finally after.

Rating:
Summary: very good, but it has been overtaken by The Great Influenza
Review: Without a doubt this is an excellent, provocative, and thoughtful book. In and of itself I'd give it 5 stars... But that would make it impossible to rate John Barry's The Great Influenza higher. Of course Barry's book came out 25 years after Crosby's, and to some extent is derivative. But it goes so far beyond Crosby, and adds so much context about scientists, the virus itself, and politics, there is unfortunately no reason to read Crosby any more. Actually that's wrong-- there is a reason. If you wnat tables and statistics, Crosby includes them. Barry does not. Although Barry's book does read better, and has a real narrative flow and scientist-characters.