I Read, Therefore I Blog

The Blurb On The Back:

Pandemic Planet
Beginning in late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly around the world, causing the deaths of millions of people and leading to closed schools, empty streets and shuttered businesses.

But viruses and pandemics have been part of human history for thousands of years, from the Black Death to SARS. PANDEMIC PLANET looks at what pandemics are, how they spread and how we deal with them. It explores how we arm ourselves against dangerous diseases, from developing groundbreaking new vaccines to simple, individual measures such as washing your hands and wearing a face mask. It also looks at how and what we learn from pandemics, as well as some of their surprisingly positive outcomes.

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The Verdict:

Anna Claybourne is an experienced writer of non-fiction for children. This reassuring and informative illustrated book about pandemics and diseases for readers aged 9+ is part of a series about issues related to the planet and will particularly help them to make sense of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. She does a great job of breaking down the causes of pandemics but also deals well with the consequences of it and does so without scaremongering.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

The Atlas Of Disease gives a unique perspective on how epidemics have spread throughout history, from the fourteenth-century plague that devastated Europe and the lethal outbreaks of cholera in the nineteenth century, right up to the AIDs epidemic of the 1980s and the catastrophic spread of zika in Brazil.

Interweaving new maps based on the latest available data with historical charts alongside intriguing, often unsettling, contemporary illustrations, this extraordinary book plots the course of some of the most virulent and deadly pandemics around the world. Discover how diseases have changed the course of history, stimulated advances in medicine and how mapping has played a key role in prevention and cure, shaping countless lives.

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The Verdict:

Sandra Hempel is a medical journalist whose illustrated book gives a potted history and description of 20 diseases that used to (and in some cases, still) ravage the world. It’s a weird mix of history, geography and science (some of which I knew from elsewhere) but there were nuggets of new information here and while the maps are a little haphazard and poorly designed, they do give a sense of the devastation caused by these diseases.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

Long the scourge of developing countries, fake pills are now increasingly common in the United States. The explosion of Internet commerce, coupled with globalisation and increased pharmaceutical use has led to an unprecedented vulnerability in the U.S. drug supply. Today, an estimated 80% of our drugs are manufactured overseas, mostly in India and China. Every link along this supply chain offers an opportunity for counterfeiters, and increasingly, they are breaking in. In 2008, fake doses of the blood thinner Heparin killed 81 people worldwide and resulted in hundreds of severe allergic reactions in the United States. In 2012, a counterfeit version of the cancer drug Avastin, containing no active chemotherapy ingredient, was widely distributed in the United States. In early 2013, a drug trafficker named Francis Ortiz Gonzalez was sentenced to prison for distributing an assortment of counterfeit, Chinese-made pharmaceuticals across America. By the time he was arrested, he had already sold over 140,000 fake pills to customers.

Even when the U.S. system works, as it mostly does, consumers are increasingly circumventing the safeguards. Skyrocketing health care costs in the U.S. have forced more Americans to become “medical tourists” seeking drugs, life-saving treatments and transplants abroad, sometimes in countries with rampant counterfeit drug problems and no FDA. Bitter Pills will heighten the public’s awareness about counterfeit and substandard drugs, critically examine the historical context of the problem and discuss possible technical solutions, and help people protect themselves. Author Muhammad H. Zaman pays special attention to the science and engineering behind both poor quality and good quality drugs, and the role of a “technological fix” for the fake drug problem. Increasingly, fake drugs affect us all.

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The Verdict:

Muhammad H. Zaman is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and International Health at Boston University and in this timely book he examines the problems in tackling drug counterfeiting from science and technology, political, regulatory, and business viewpoints but while he does well at highlighting the complexity of the issues involved, there’s a lot of repetition, the writing is quite dry and the last chapter on ivory left me bewildered.

BITTER PILLS: THE GLOBAL WAR ON COUNTERFEIT DRUGS was released in the United Kingdom on 26th April 2019. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

What do the invention of anaesthetics in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Nazis’ use of cocaine, and the development of Prozac have in common? The answer is that they’re all products of the same logic that defines out contemporary era: ‘the age of anaesthesia’. Laurent de Sutter shows how large aspects of our lives are now characterised by the management of our emotions through drugs, ranging from the everyday use of sleeping pills to hard narcotics. Chemistry has become so much a part of us that we can’t even see how much it has changed us.

In this era, being a subject doesn’t simply mean being subjected to powers that decide our lives: it means that our very emotions have been outsourced to chemical stimulation. Yet we don’t understand why the drugs that we take are unable to free us from fatigue and depression, and from the absence of desire that now characterises our psycho-political condition. We have forgotten what it means to be excited because our only excitement has become drug-induced. We have to abandon the narcotic stimulation that we’ve come to rely on and find a way back to the collective excitement that is narcocapitalism’s greatest fear.

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The Verdict:

Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and in this book he aims to describe how contemporary life is characterised by the use of drugs to manage human emotions and how this is manipulated to benefit the capitalist system but although I enjoyed the historical sections, I found de Sutter’s arguments confusing and unconvincing, which ultimately made for a disappointing read.

NARCOCAPITALISM was released in the United Kingdom on 3rd November 2017. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

”I am a junior doctor. It is 4 a.m. I have run arrest calls, treated life-threatening bleeding, held the hand of a young woman dying of cancer, scuttled down miles of dim corridors wanting to sob with sheer exhaustion, forgotten to eat, forgotten to drink, drawn on every fibre of strength that I possess to keep my patients safe from harm.”

Rachel Clarke’s incredible memoir follows her journey as a junior doctor, offering a glimpse into a life spent between the dissection room and the mortuary, the bedside and the doctors’ mess, exposing stark realities about today’s NHS and what it means to be entrusted with carrying another’s life in your hands.

Rachel was at the forefront of the historic junior doctor strikes in 2016, campaigning against the government and arguing across the press that imposing a contract on young doctors would irrevocably damage the NHS.

This book affects us all.

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The Verdict:

In this memoir Rachel Clarke sets out her experiences as a junior doctor training and working in the NHS but while it’s strong in the pressures it lacks the insight and detail that would make this the searing political account that it seems to want to be.

YOUR LIFE IN MY HANDS was released in the United Kingdom on 13th July 2017. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the ARC of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

An absorbing history of mankind’s efforts to eradicate smallpox, tuberculosis, and other deadly diseases, and an inside look at today’s global efforts to defeat polio.

Smallpox was once the most feared scourge in the world, claiming the lives of over two million people a year, killing peasants and nobility alike. But by the second half of the twentieth century, smallpox had been reduced to a memory – effectively stamped out of every community around the world. In THE END OF PLAGUES, immunologist John Rhodes explores how scientists, as well as average men and women, made this victory possible, and what it means for the future eradication of diseases from polio to AIDS.

Spanning three centuries, he weaves together the discovery of vaccination, the birth and growth of immunology, and the fight to eradicate the world’s most feared diseases. The story travels from the early nineteenth century foundling voyages, where chains of orphans, vaccinated one by one against smallpox, were sent to protect colonies around the globe, to Jonas Salk’s laboratory where, after decades of research, the polio vaccine finally became a reality. He also reveals the darker side of immunology’s great race, as countries during the Cold War stockpiled smallpox as a biological weapon. Today, aid groups including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization have made the eradication of polio a priority, and Rhodes takes us behind the scenes to witness firsthand the immense global effort underway to make polio the second disease mankind has eradicated.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Renowned immunologist John Rhodes looks at the birth and development of immunology through the development of vaccines – specifically in the treatment of smallpox, polio and tuberculosis and then the fight to eradicate smallpox and polio on a global basis. There’s a lot in the book that’s fascinating and I learnt an awful lot about the subject and about people such as Jenner and also about the difficulties in engaging on global vaccination. It is not a perfect book, however, the time jumping irritated me and at times Rhodes skips over details such as names that would have been good to know but that doesn’t detract from what’s a decent read and which makes a technical, scientific subject relatively easy for laymen to understand.

THE END OF PLAGUES was released in the United Kingdom on 22nd October 2013. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the ARC of this book.