Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

During the summer of 1793, Mattie Cook lives above the family coffee shop with her widowed mother and grandfather. Mattie spends her days avoiding chores and making plans to turn the family business into the finest Philadelphia has ever seen. But then the fever breaks out. Disease sweeps the streets, destroying everything in its path and turning Mattie's world upside down. At her feverish mother's insistence,... (more)

The Last Town on Earth: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

Set against the backdrop of one of the most virulent epidemics that America ever experienced–the 1918 flu epidemic–Thomas Mullen’s powerful, sweeping first novel is a tale of morality in a time of upheaval. Deep in the mist-shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest is a small mill town called Commonwealth, conceived as a haven for workers weary of exploitation. For Philip Worthy, the adopted son of the town’s... (more)

The Tipping Point

How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

by Malcolm Gladwell

This celebrated New York Times bestsellernow poised to reach an even wider audience in paperbackis a book that is changing the way North Americans think about selling products and disseminating ideas. Gladwells new afterword to this edition describes how readers can constructively apply the tipping point principle in their own lives and work. Widely hailed as an important work that offers not only a road map to... (more)

The Great Influenza

The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

by John M. Barry

At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of... (more)

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History

by Molly Caldwell Crosby

In this account, a journalist traces the course of yellow fever, stopping in 1878 Memphis to "vividly <evoke> the Faulkner-meets-'Dawn of the Dead' horrors,"*-and moving on to today's strain of the killer virus. Over the course of history, yellow fever has paralyzed governments, halted commerce, quarantined cities, moved the U.S. capital, and altered the outcome of wars. During a single summer in Memphis... (more)

Contagion (Tpb)

by Robin Cook

This tale of deadly epidemic spread features Dr John Stapleton, a forensic pathologist hardened by his experiences of personal and professional loss. When a series of lethal illnesses strike seemingly at random in New York City, Stapleton suspects he has stumbled on a diabolical conspiracy.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

By the time Rock Hudson's death in 1985 alerted all America to the danger of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had spread across the nation, killing thousands of people and emerging as the greatest health crisis of the 20th century. America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously? In answering these questions, Shilts weaves weaves the... (more)

by Carla Buckley

How far would you go to protect your family ? Ann Brooks never thought she’d have to answer that question. Then she found her limits tested by a crisis no one could prevent. Now, as her neighborhood descends into panic, she must make tough choices to protect everyone she loves from a threat she cannot even see. In this chillingly urgent novel, Carla Buckley confronts us with the terrifying decisions we are... (more)

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (P.S.)

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (P.S.)

by John Kelly

La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery,... (more)

Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis... (more)

The Demon in the Freezer : A True Story

by Richard Preston

“The bard of biological weapons captures the drama of the front lines.” -Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navy The first major bioterror event in the United States-the anthrax attacks in October 2001-was a clarion call for scientists who work with “hot” agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer , his first nonfiction book since The... (more)

Plagues and Peoples

by William H. McNeill

Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, the... (more)

Viruses, Plagues, and History

by Michael B. A. Oldstone

In this book, Oldstone focuses on several of the most famous viruses humanity has battled,. He begins with some we have effectively defeated, such as smallpox, polio, measles, and yellow fever, then describes the fascinating viruses that have captured headlines in more recent years: Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers, Hantavirus, mad cow disease, and, of course, AIDS. He goes on to tell of the many scientists... (more)

Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them

Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them

by Mark Jerome Walters

"In a clear, engaging style, Dr. Walters tells the tale of each disease like a detective story. He allows each mystery to unfold as it did in reality, often slowly, through the lives of the plants and animals involved, the first human victims, the government officials who tried to respond, and the scientists who ultimately explained what was happening." -NEW YORK TIMES "...a fascinating work of ecological... (more)

Out Of The Deep I Cry (Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries)

Out Of The Deep I Cry (Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries)

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

On April 1, 1930, Jonathan Ketchem's wife Jane walked from her house to the police department to ask for help in finding her husband. The men, worn out from a night of chasing bootleggers, did what they could. But no one ever saw Jonathan Ketchem again... Now decades later, someone else is missing in Miller's Kill, NY. This time it's the physician of the clinic that bears the Ketchem name. Suspicion falls on a... (more)

Blindness

by Jose Saramago

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession... (more)

Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find... (more)

The Ghost Map

by Steven Johnson

A thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London-and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world. From the dynamic thinker routinely compared to Malcolm Gladwell, E. O. Wilson, and James Gleick, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner with a real-life historical hero that... (more)

Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impacts on Human History

Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impacts on Human History

by J. N. Hays

Great pandemics have resulted in significant death tolls and major social disruption. Other "virgin soil" epidemics have struck down large percentages of populations that had no previous contact with newly introduced microbes. Written by a specialist in the history of science and medicine, the essays in this volume discuss pandemics and epidemics affecting Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, covering diseases... (more)

A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women

A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women

by Connie Willis, S. Williams

From the archives of Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov's Science Fiction magazines comes this thought-provoking anthology of stories by a group of acclaimed, bestselling female writers who have changed the nature of visionary fiction. These 10 classic stories, each featuring well-developed, strong, female characters, have garnered numerous literary awards and span every style and theme in speculative... (more)

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Tags: epidemics

by Laurie Halse Anderson