I've been on a reading tear lately. I finally completed the book on pandemics and viruses and other epidemic-type diseases. It was an extremely readable tome - 500+ pages. I learned a lot about SARS, Ebola, AIDS, as well as the various flus we have had, like the Hong Kong, H1N1, and of course, the 1918 Spanish Flu. I recommend it to one and all. It's called Spillover by David Quammen.
I also finished next month's book club selection: Educated by Tara Westover. She wrote about growing up in a Survivalist's family in Idaho, working in her father's junkyard and being homeschooled after a fashion, and helping her mother with her midwifery and essential oil business.
She ends up going to BYU, Cambridge, Harvard and ends with a Ph.D. from Cambridge. But her life was not easy. In fact, she is so brutally honest that I did not enjoy the book from that standpoint. She was so brutally honest. I kept yelling at her to "Do the right thing", and she wouldn't. But it is worth reading. It ends well.
The last book I completed this month was In the Wake of the Plague by Norman Cantor. It was about the Black Death, in 1348 England primarily, and it's after-effects on England and Europe as a whole. It was short, interesting, and not a difficult read.
Currently, I am reading three nonfiction books about the 1876 Presidential election, our nation's first election that had an electoral question about it; a story of a young boy who becomes a physicist so he can build a time travel machine to go back and keep his father alive who died when he (the boy)was ten; and small tome about the history of an old - 1851 - English rectory, room by room, and discussing everything and anything that could reasonably be connected to it.
My fiction book is about a Russian count imprisoned in a plush Moscow hotel in 1922 and cannot leave it. I know the book goes to 1958. It was a bestseller last year.
More about all of these in the days to come.
Naming pandemics such as Spanish flu (or the French flu as the Spanish called it),Ebola (river), Hong Kong, etc. is a sensitive subject. Prejudices toward ethnic groups/areas have happened throughout history not just in today's social/political environment, I don't know why they don't refer to them by date and strain such as 1918 H1N1.
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