
A New York Times bestseller
The definitive account of the infectious diseases threatening humanity by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Laurie Garrett "Prodigiously researched . . . A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times After decades spent assuming that the conquest of infectious disease was imminent, people on all continents now find themselves besieged by AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, cholera that defies chlorine water treatment, and exotic viruses that can kill in a matter of hours. Relying on extensive interviews with leading experts in virology, molecular biology, disease ecology, and medicine, as well as field research in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, Central America, and the United States, Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague takes readers from the savannas of eastern Bolivia to the rain forests of the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo on a harrowing, fifty year journey through the history of our battles with microbes. This book is a work of investigative reportage like no other and a wake-up call to a world that has become complacent in the face of infectious disease--one that offers a sobering and prescient warning about the dangers of ignoring the coming plague."A sober, scary book that not only limns the dangers posed by emerging diseases but also raises serious questions about two centuries worth of Enlightenment beliefs in science and technology and progress . . . A frightening vision of the future and a deeply unsettling one." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"This brilliant book conveys a grim message: that we may be entering a period of dramatic change in our relationship with infectious disease . . . Other 'emerging disease' books have appeared on these shelves as well, including some sizable volumes, but Garrett's is the intellectual heavyweight of the collection . . . I found it hard to put the book down." --Peter Godfrey-Smith, Boston Review "Like her role model Rachel Carson, whose 1962 Silent Spring woke up society to environmental poisoning, Garrett aims to dispel social and political complacency about the threat of old, new, and yet-unknown microbial catastrophes in a global ecology that links Bujumbura, Bangkok, and Boston more closely than anyone appreciates." --Richard A. Knox, The Boston Globe "Garrett has done a brilliant job of putting scientific work into layman's language, and the scariness of medical melodramas is offset by the excitement of scientific detection." --The New Yorker "The book is ambitious, but it succeeds...[its] scope is encyclopedic, its mass of detail startling." --The Economist