The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

John M. Barry 2004

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
pandemic history medicine America

Our Take

Barry's history of the 1918 influenza that killed fifty million people is also a history of American public health, medical science, and wartime propaganda. The decision to suppress news of the pandemic to maintain morale killed more people than the virus alone could have. A book that reads like prophecy and arrived in paperback just in time to be ignored again.

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