When it’s hard to get to the library, it’s a good time to take a look at some ebooks that you can get to from home – you can find all of these works by searching on their titles in QuickSearch on our home page.
Now, I’m talking Pandemic City here – I’ll cover more distracting titles another time, but these ebooks will help in better understanding pandemics that are thankfully past, all-too-present, and (sigh) yet to come. Most of them are firmly about one kind of pandemic or another, but others address pandemics as being only part of a larger context of potential disasters that could occur, just in case COVID-19 hasn’t provided enough excitement for you already. Anyway, while we’re all a little sharper on pandemics than we were not all that long ago, good basic information never hurts:
* Pandemics: What Everyone Needs To Know – Doherty, Peter C. Oxford, 2013
* Pandemic Influenza: Emergency Planning And Community Preparedness – ed. by Jeffrey R. Ryan CRC Press, 2008
Of course, we have an excellent work on everybody’s favorite plague:
* Encyclopedia Of The Black Death – Byrne, Joseph P. ABC-CLIO, 2012
And to paraphrase Tina Turner, what’s politics got to do with it?
* When Science And Politics Collide: The Public Interest At Risk – Schneider, Robert O. Praeger, 2018
COVID-19 is certainly not the only pandemic humanity has ever faced; some authors look to the past:
* Flu Hunter: Unlocking The Secrets Of A Virus – Webster, Robert G. Otago University Press, 2018
* The Great Manchurian Plague Of 1910-1911: The Geopolitics Of An Epidemic Disease – Summers, William C. Yale, 2012
* Africa In The Time Of Cholera: A History Of Pandemics From 1815 To The Present – Echenberg, Myron. Cambridge, 2011
* Plows, Plagues, And Petroleum: How Humans Took Control Of Climate – Ruddiman, William F. Princeton, 2005
* The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events In A Public Culture Of Danger – Caduff, Carlo. California, 2015
While other authors look to the future, at a somewhat different definition of Alvin Toffler’s phrase ‘Future Shock’:
* Humanity On A Tightrope: Thoughts On Empathy, Family, And Big Changes For A Viable Future – Paul R. Ehrlich and Robert E. Ornstein Rowman & Littlefield, 2010
* Global Catastrophes And Trends: The Next 50 Years – Smil, Vaclav. MIT, 2008
* Megadisasters: The Science Of Predicting The Next Catastrophe – Diacu, Florin. Princeton, 2009
* Germ Wars: The Politics Of Microbes And America’s Landscape Of Fear – Armstrong, Melanie. California, 2017
I’ll finish with a couple of good print volumes in case you find yourself actually in the Consortium Library. First is a good overall work:
* REF WA13.E564 2008, v.1 and 2 Encyclopedia Of Pestilence, Pandemics, And Plagues – ed. by Joseph P. Byrne Greenwood, 2008
And this last one is one good for nursing students, with one chapter about emerging infectious diseases and pandemics:
* WC100.W38 2012 Netter’s Infectious Diseases – [ed.] by Elaine C. Jong and Dennis L. Stevens Elsevier, 2011
Still, as a postscript, this has been such a serious subject for piling one difficult title on top of another that I can’t help but leave you with a diverting link to some amazing photographs that have – I promise! – absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with coronavirus, courtesy of the BBC:
Antarctic Seal Wins Top Prize
https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52007548