This is big-picture medical history ... This all-encompassing view of humanity’s battles against disease provides a useful background to the more-specialized COVID-19 volumes.
Although daunting in earlier chapters, overall Kenny has written a medical history about the nature of plagues that general readers will find accessible and easy to understand. Readers intimidated by other books of similar topics need not avoid this informative and colorful history. The author brings the book up to the present day, with discussions of 21st-century outbreaks and plagues ... Kenny’s historical assessment of humanity’s handling of infectious diseases, including both successes and failures, is a testament to the remarkable progress made in modern medicine and is a well-rounded overview of the history of plagues.
Though the author’s popularizing approach is less scientifically rich than, say, David Quammen’s, it still stands in a long tradition of informative plagues-and-people books such as Hans Zinsser’s 1935 classic, Rats, Lice, and History ... A timely, lucid look at the role of pandemics in history.
... cogent ... Kenny offers a lucid assessment of successes (programs to enhance unemployment benefits and provide universal income support) and mistakes (late and overly long travel bans) in the global response to Covid-19, and calls for strengthening the World Health Organization and international agreements on drug quality and antibiotic use. The result is a worthy primer on a subject of pressing importance.
