Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Cover Your Cough

Ironically, I don't pay much attention to the news-news, if you know what I mean. So when a colleague came to me a few days ago with a look of horror on her face and said, "I'm going to Mexico in a couple weeks!", I didn't get it. And when I congratulated her on it (because that seemed like the right thing to do) and she looked at me like I had lost my mind, it dawned on me that perhaps I was missing something...and that something was swine flu. Which is, again, ironic, because plague-like pandemics are one of my very favorite topics to read about! There are so many riveting and downright scary stories out there, both true and made up, about blights taking out major sections of the population - or the entire population in the case of The History of the Dead - that it's almost too hard to choose...

The first book I want to talk about it is a fascinating recommendation I got from Emily-Jane. It's Sandra Hempel's The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump and details the true story of John Snow, a doctor in Victorian England, who through determination and scientific investigation (an unknown practice at the time) discovered that cholera was being spread through contaminated drinking water and not just "bad air". This is one of those non-fiction books that read more like a thriller!

Back in college I studied history and one fine day William H. McNeill came to my school and read from his book Plagues and Peoples. In my previous years of studying history I had never heard anyone mention that blankets full of smallpox were just as important to the shaping of mankind's history as the Battle of the Bulge. McNeill and his book intrigued me, and though there have been many books written on similar topics since Plagues and Peoples, in my opinion this is one of the best.

One of my all-time favorite authors is Connie Willis, and one of my favorite books by her is called The Doomsday Book. This award-winning story mixes time-travel, an influenza epidemic in 2054, and the Black Death of 1348. I remember being on the edge of my seat with worry over the characters I had grown so fond of, and Willis does a brilliant job creating a believable future-world while describing with historic accuracy the plague of the Middle Ages.

For more information on swine flu, both the state of Oregon and Multnomah County have set up web pages with up-to-date information. And we here at the library are also keeping folks informed!