PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewInstead of a disease thriller or a straight memoir, Farmer’s book is structured almost like an experimental novel, or a time-twisting prestige television drama. The chronology loops back on itself multiple times ... Farmer begins the final section of Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds with a quote apparently uttered by Louis Pasteur on his deathbed: \'Le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout.\' The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything. If indeed Pasteur said the line, the reference to “the terrain” was an allusion to the \'terrain\' of the human body, and to the immune system in particular. But Farmer invokes it to point to a broader landscape, more political than biological: the violent conflict and material inequalities that inevitably play a role in determining whether a virus destroys a human life, or leaves it relatively unscathed. \'This was not,\' Farmer writes, \'a history of inevitable mortality that resulted from ancient evolutionary forces. … It was the contingent history of a population made vulnerable.\' For that terrain — and the ravages of history that created it — Farmer has given us an invaluable map.
