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Summary: A fascinating Story
Review: Good historical information, many interesting biographical sketches, and stories about the flu of 1918. The worst epidemic in world history. (and the least talked about.)
The disease came and went in a flash and ultimately led to many medical breakthroughs.
This is a good overview of the subject and fairly fast read. Enjoyable.
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Summary: Informative read and a couple of adventure stories too
Review: First off, this book is some things and is not some things. It is very informative and was well researched, there are lots of footnotes at the end. Much of the chapters read as separate articles that could stand independently. What it is not is a novel like read similar to the story that appears in Hot Zone. I thoroughly enjoyed reading and learning about the 1918 flu and about the modern researchers trying to find clues to what made that flu so deadly. If you are interested in knowing about that topic then I give this book a strong recommendation. If you are looking for a novel type page turner you'll probably be disappointed. There was one situation that made the whole work worth reading to me, maybe because I have a weird sense of humor. That was the telling of two separate research expeditions into the frozen north to dig up bodies of people that had died of the 1918 flu. One team was filled with experts, used x-ray to search, spent years planning, spent tons of money, had tons of media present. Didn't get results, the bodies were too decomposed. The other expedition was one guy with a pick. Well actually he got a few villagers to help him dig, but he spent only a few thousand of his own money and got results, real helpful results, in a couple of weeks. I also found the detailing of a flu scare that happened in Hong Kong with a jump from chickens to humans a very interesting story. How that scare and the research that went into studying it and comparing that to the 1918 ordeal was fascinating. There is a bit of information here about the politics of the Swine Flu panic in the 1970's and how the Ford administration dealt with it. Some of the same kinds of questions and issues are relevant today with all the threats of toxic warfare. If you find the topic of the 1918 flu interesting and how it relates to modern day problems and solutions this book is a strong recommendation.
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Summary: Influenza
Review: Flu by Gina Kolata is about the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and how it greatly effected the world when World War I was taking place. This book taught me a lot about different Influenzas and especially The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and it was very interesting. I learned that the Flu in 1918 killed more people in 1918 than any other illness in world history including the Black Death. This flu was twenty-five times more deadly than ordinary influenzas. It killed 2.5 percent of its victims. Ordinary influenzas kill one-tenth of one percent of their victims.
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Summary: A sickly imitation of THE HOT ZONE
Review: Gina Kolata seems frustrated that Richard Preston had such a big hit with THE HOT ZONE. She refers to that book, and the Ebola virus a few times in FLU as if to say, "If you think Ebola was bad, get a load of MY virus!" True to form, FLU is modeled after THE HOT ZONE: first is the tale of a disgusting killer disease. Then comes the story of the scientists who try to make sense of it. Thrown in is the story of a big false alarm. Finally... the medical mystery remains unsolved. If this sounds familiar, it should come as no surprise that FLU doesn't work nearly as well as the original. Which is ironic since THE HOT ZONE wasn't especially original. The problem is that while THE HOT ZONE is a true story cleverly structured after the fictional Michael Crichton novel, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, Kolata apes THE HOT ZONE too jealously. There's nothing clever about it. The story could have been told better differently. The subtitle of FLU is "The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It." In telling this story, Kolata stresses how underexaminded the pandemic was (and is). She makes a point about how it is ignored in textbooks, not spoken of by older folks, and all but forgotten by our culture, despite the millions who died as a result. Yet Kolata falls victim of this very phenomena by rushing the "story of the Great Influenza Pandemic" too quickly before launching into the story of the Swine Flu fiasco and the yet-unrealized search by scientists for the original killer virus. The first part of this book, the story of the pandemic itself, works - it is scary and engaging. The rest drags. In the years since THE HOT ZONE, an epidemic of killer virus books have spread like the flu. FLU is not a long book, so fans of this genre will not be entirely disappointed. But the basic idea has been done before, and done better.
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Summary: One of the best books I have read in a while!
Review: Flu by Gina Kolata is one of the best-written, most interesting books I have read in a long time. It is an exciting history of the 1918 influenza pandemic and the science behind its subsequent explanation. I originally purchased this book because it was offered at a discounted price and looked (based on the cover) interesting, not because I had any special interest in epidemeology or the author. Now, after reading Flu, I would like to know more about both! The story of the 1918 flu pandemic is frightening. Reading about it left me pondering the same question posed by the author to herself in the opening pages of her book: I am a scientist, I have taken a college microbiology class, so why haven't I heard about an illness that killed 20 million people (at least) in the span of a year? This flu, after mildly foreshadowing its presence at the close of the 1917-1918 season, struck hard over the course of a few weeks in the fall of 1918 and continued its march around the world for the rest of the season. It affected everything about people lives that year, from where it was legal to cough to who was able to at least put men on the field of the War to End All Wars. The subsequent history of trying to explain what happened in 1918 is also compelling. Several interesting personalities are involved, each in their different fields trying to shed new light on the old story-- virologists infecting pigs and ferrets, molecular biologists trying to get DNA from long-stored tissue, physicians trying to recover frozen virus in Alaska and a Canadian geographer with a talent for drawing media attention to her work. I highly recommend this book to anyone with eyes. Its only possible shortcoming may be in the cursory explanation certain technical aspects receive. However, if readers don't already know a little about molecular biology (including DNA/viral replication and PCR), it is worth having to do a little research to get up to speed.
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Summary: Very Interesting, well told
Review: Some of the other reviews point out the fact that the middle chapters of the book move away from the 1918 flu to discuss things like the Hong Kong flu and the 1976 Swine Flu. I disagree that this has little to do with the 1918 flu. The middle chapters put perspective on how the world was effected by the 1918 flu pandemic. For what other reason would the US and other world governments overreact to the threat of a flu pandemic? Had it not been for the 1918 flu, these incidents probably would not even have occurred. Overall, the book is full of information and the story is well told for those who are not fully versed in biologese. It also helps to put in perspective the long lasting effects of such a horrible pandemic.
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Summary: Deceptively titled
Review: FLU: THE STORY OF THE GREAT INFLUENZA PANDEMIC OF 1918 AND THE SEARCH FOR THE VIRUS THAT CAUSED IT starts out impressively with a chapter on the influenza pandemic of 1918, which globally caused the caused the deaths of at least 20-40 million people (and perhaps up to 100 million), followed by a chapter on the history of disease pandemics and death in history. I thought, wow, this could be another riveting book like 1994's HOT ZONE, which was inspired by the Ebola virus. However, in its middle chapters, FLU drifted off course to a discussion of other flu scares of the late 20th century, specifically the Swine Flu fiasco of 1976 and the Hong Kong Flu panic of 1977. In retrospect, neither was relevant to the deadly 1918 virus except to illustrate the epidemiologists' fixation with influenza as a potentially catastrophic killer. Thus, the book should perhaps have been titled FLU: THE BOGEY MAN UNDERNEATH EPIDEMIOLOGISTS' BEDS. Moreover, though author Gina Kolata did return to the "search for" subtheme, even that fizzled by the end. The hunt for the 1918 virus, and a delineation of what made it so uniquely vicious, remains a story whose ending remains to be written. The HIV virus has replaced the influenza virus as the focus of the scientific community's investigative efforts. There was one aspect of FLU that I did find notable, and that was a hint of gender bias on the part of the author towards the book's three principal "heroes": Dr. Johan Hultin, Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, and Dr. Kirsty Duncan. All three attempted to recover the 1918 virus from the lung tissue of victims that died from the disease. Hultin, a San Francisco pathologist, went looking for corpses of Eskimos buried in the Alaskan permafrost. Duncan, a geographer by profession, organized the exhumation of dead miners buried at Spitzbergen, Norway. Taubenberger, an MD/PhD researcher with the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, went rummaging among tissue samples preserved in paraffin blocks stored for decades at the institute. Kolata admiringly described the professional pedigrees and accomplishments of both Hultin and Taubenberger, but virtually ignored Duncan, except to infer that her "long hair and doe eyes and raw emotions" may have had an unsettling effect on the marriage of one of her team members. Oh, and that Duncan's own marriage broke up. (Was this relevant? Who cares?) Moreover, images of Hultin and Taubenberger hard at work are featured in the volume's too paltry section of photographs, but not Duncan. And, in the "Acknowledgements", the author thanks Hultin and Taubenberger for their "extraordinary assistance", but no gratitude, however lukewarm, is awarded Duncan. Do I perceive some cattiness here? Meow! I found FLU marginally interesting, but it in no way met expectations. I wouldn't recommend buying it unless you're obsessed with the subject matter.
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Summary: Some good, some not
Review: Here's the problem: the horrendous 1918 flu pandemic is a fascinating story, and so is the search for the virus that continues to this day. That material starts and ends the book.
But there's a bunch of other stuff in the middle that's a lot less interesting, like the chapters on the swine flu of 1976 and the Hong Kong flu. Although these are important stories, and tangentially related to the main story, these chapters are flat and dull by comparison, filled with the droning of various government bureaucrats, and as a result, the book flounders in the middle.
This book cries out to be revised as research into the 1918 virus yields more information. It's not the author's fault that the mystery remains murky, but it leaves the reader with a feeling of a job not completed, that perhaps the book was written too soon.
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Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: The author most have been compensated based on the number of pages written. Sadly she had to wonder so far of course just to reach 300 pages. At least 100 good pages were mixed in with 200 bad ones. But the good aren't good enough. Don't waste your time.
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Summary: A Forgotten Moment in History
Review: I am probably in the minority but I have always felt that the most influential period of the twentieth century was the period of "The Great War"--World War I (1914-1918). One of the outcomes of the war that is not always remembered or recognized as part of this period is the worldwide outbreak of a deadly influenza in 1918. I remember seeing a documentary on the so-called "Spanish flu" of 1918 when I was a very young child that has always stayed with me and may be part of the reason I am so interested in the period. Finding a book that focuses on this important historical event has been difficult, however, until now. Gina Kolata has written an intriguing book about an epidemic that still remains a mystery over 80 years later. Near the end of the first world war, an outbreak of flu swept the world killing more people over a wider area in a shorter period than any other disease before or since. At least 40 million people were killed worldwide and, strangely, this flu killed young people in the prime of life rather than the very young and old that usually succumb to flu outbreaks. Then, almost overnight, the epidemic faded away and the world did its best to forget the destruction. In the first part of the book, Kolata takes us through what little is known about how this virus was able to sweep through the world in 1918. In the second part, she recounts how various scientists since that time have attempted to isolate a sample of the virus so it can be studied with modern technology. This part of the story takes us to the Arctic to exhume frozen victims of the flu and to Army warehouses where preserved tissue of military victims still remains in storage. All in all, it makes for a fascinating story of medicine's quest to understand past epidemics and hopefully prevent future outbreaks. In a world that has tensions based on the concept of biological weapons and terror, this is a book that makes for an interesting read. It reminds us that biological disasters are, first and foremost, natural happenings that can reoccur at any time. It also points out the importance of continued research into the causes and cures for viruses that seem as simple and harmless as the flu. We cannot get so involved in protecting ourselves from esoteric diseases and threats that could very well end up being relatively harmless that we forget to do basic research into diseases that have shown themselves to be continually harmful.
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