Why did I love this book?
A wonderfully researched and written account of both the Influenza of 1918-1919 and of America's entry into the Great War. Barry included the only mention I had come across about the catastrophic illness of President Wilson on the eve of the Versailles treaty negotiations. We can only wonder what might have been, had Wilson caught influenza just a few weeks later.
7 authors picked The Great Influenza as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
At the height of WWI, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing danger of the avian flu, "The Great Influenza"…