99 books like The Promise of Plague Wolves

This is a little historical gem. The author was the wife of the British consul to Constantinople in 1718 and wrote copious letters home detailing her travels and her life in the Ottoman Empire’s capital. She describes the exoticism, the requirement that women be veiled in public (which she saw as freeing), the sumptuous jewels and wealth, the admiration of pregnant women (and the pressure to be pregnant to prove you were still young).   

Her description of smallpox ‘parties’ is particularly interesting. These gatherings were held annually to inoculate children by using a tiny amount of smallpox pus scratched into the forearm. A survivor of smallpox herself, Mary had her own small son successfully inoculated and brought the knowledge back with her to England, but it was not until Edward Jenner introduced a vaccine later in the century that a treatment became more widely known.

I am a historian of early America, including the American Revolution, though I'm not a huge reader (or writer) of conventional military history. Published in 2001, Elizabeth Fenn's book was in many ways ahead of its time in emphasizing how military outcomes—and strategies—were often contingent on other seemingly unrelated factors. In this case, she argues that smallpox was a decisive force in the American War for Independence. The continental scope of her study, moreover, provides a link between that war and the ultimately successful military offensives that the independent United States inflicted on disease-weakened Native American peoples in the post-revolutionary era.

This book is an optimistic narration about one of the most amazing and important achievements in medical history.

It is written by Donald Henderson, the doctor who led the eradication campaign against the arguably most severe and incurable disease in history. Smallpox killed or disabled hundreds of millions of people and remains so far the only virus to have been deliberately eradicated globally.

This story is an ode to the unlimited power of science, education, and multilateralism. It shows how, led by a few people and a lot of positive stamina, the world got together and overcame all hurdles despite technical challenges and political division in a highly fragmented post-war world.

Echoing recent events with Covid – and hopefully providing a blueprint for tackling climate change – it shows how we can stand together when circumstances require it and achieve what seemed for ages completely impossible. An inspiring example for… show more.

This 1974 book, by the founder of one of the world’s great picture libraries, was a real eye-opener to me when I first read it. We are all nostalgic and look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, and so do I. But then we forget about the hunger and the crime, tuberculosis, smallpox and heaps of trash on the streets, the child labor, and the despair of the aged. This richly illustrated book, with its multitude of stories, set me straight. For instance, did you know that New York had 150,000 horses in 1900, each producing around 20 pounds of manure a day? The past stank. It makes you deeply grateful for science, technology, and economic growth.

As a historian, some books just keep coming back to you. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples is just such a book. 

He is really the first historian to outline the dramatic impact that infectious diseases have had on human history. He outlines the spread of smallpox, diphtheria, Yellow Fever, Malaria, the Plague, and many others, as they originate mostly in Africa and come into the Mediterranean Ocean, to produce cycles of death. 

But the people who lived on the edge of that ocean soon came to develop antibodies, and ultimately, master the impact of such terrible diseases.  

Unfortunately, those diseases were soon transferred to the Americas, where perhaps a hundred million American Indians died from them. They had no immunities!

Had such a calamity not occurred, the two western hemispheric continents might easily be dominated by Natives, who spoke a different language and prayed to a different God.

Dr. Larry, as he is known to our Neem Karoli Baba satsang (the community of seekers), has written a tour de force memoir of his extraordinary adventures, starting as a young hippie doctor in Detroit and moving on to cofounding one of the first digital social networks (The WELL), cofounding the Seva Foundation (restoring sight to millions of blind people), and being a key player in eradicating smallpox.

He is chair of the Skoll Global Threats Fund and the epidemiologist California Governor Newsom called upon to set up COVID protocols for the entertainment industry. To me, the deepest value of Sometimes Brilliant is the way it illustrates how science and service to humanity combine with spiritual awareness and love—the perfect mix of karma yoga and bhakti (service and devotion).

A stunning assembly of archival photographs and newspaper clippings from Jackson County, Wisconsin, in the last decade and a half of the 19th century, and the definitive explanation of why nobody in old-time photographs is ever smiling—and, I choose to believe, the real reason the parts of The Wizard of Oz set in Kansas were filmed in black and white. Economic privation, unceasing bereavement, disease both physical and mental—in other words, Tuesday. Was there any joy in Jackson County? Somewhere, I’m sure. What’s documented here is a stark, powerful beauty. The most real book I’ve ever encountered, and one of two on face-out display on my bookshelves.

Most of us can’t even pronounce the names of the childhood diseases vaccines have almost eradicated, nor can we imagine the parental grief, and childhood suffering, that those diseases routinely inflicted on families until well into the 20th Century. This comprehensive history reminds us that the development of vaccines was always a see-saw between life-saving advances, and terrible mistakes and failures.

Alaska’s Indigenous people—expert storytellers and artists—have yet to author many works of fiction, so it’s a pleasure to have discovered this new novel by a writer of Inupiaq heritage.

Set in 1893 during a smallpox epidemic, Sivulliq features two viewpoint characters—an Inupiaq mother whose small daughter is kidnapped by a commercial whaling captain and a Black whaler on the whaling ship. The fast-paced plot follows the family’s efforts to find the ship and rescue the child, while life aboard the ship is narrated by the reluctant whaler.

The historic truths brought to life here include the devastation of Native Alaskans from disease and famine, the prevalence of Black whalers and the often-brutal conditions on board, and Inupiaq spiritual connections (then and now) to the land and ancestors. 

Despite ever louder calls to “follow the science,” vaccine skepticism only seems to be rising.

Maya Goldenberg’s arguments helped me see why handwringing over the “war on expertise” fails and how we could do better. She shows that the crisis is rooted in declining public trust of medical institutions. Vaccine Hesitancy helped open my eyes to a critical fact: Medical skepticism is a rational response to a history of research scandals, corporate misconduct, and discrimination.

I honestly believe that had public officials paid attention to books like Vaccine Hesitancy, the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic would not have torn Americans apart.