While sitting at the dining table at Chez Oliphant, Claire and I started talking books. I suspect we started talking about books because I was lamenting not having any good road trip books, and I was about to start a four day road trip. Well, for solo road trip books, Claire has some great recommendations. This one came out because I had recommended the Dread Nation sequel (zombies!), and Claire countered with Lovecraft, or rather Jim Crow South with Cthulhu. Go on...

Turns out, while there are elements of Lovecraft in the book, the book is more an homage to Lovecraft than a Lovecraftian fan-fic. It reads like a serial, with eight separate stories, each tangentially related to the others, told in sequential order, each with different characters as the focus. There is an over-arching plot, which works very well with the satisfying ending (good guys win! rah!). The Jim Crow parts were uncomfortable reading and that is likely the point. One of the stories didn't interest me at all, but the uncomfortable parts relating to abuse of power were worth sticking with.

I think Claire's review sums up the book well: "White people were all, 'Gasp! Ghosts???' and the black people were all, shrug 'Ghosts. Sure, okay.'" The Wikipedia article sums up the individual stories well. If you like urban fiction with a hint of Lovecraft, and want to sit with racial difficulties (yes, you do), this is a great book to pick up. So great that it is a mini-series. I suspect the book is better, but haven't seen the show, so don't know.

Rob Whiteley recommended this book to me, Ryan Holiday recommended this book to his reading list, and I strongly recommend this book to pretty much anyone who will listen. The Great Influenza was written over ten years ago and tells us ALL ABOUT the (no longer) upcoming pandemic. The parallels between the 1918 Spanish Flu and the 2019 CoVid19 pandemic are disheartening, making this book both a history book and a playbook on how NOT to handle a pandemic.

The Great Influenza tells us the history of The Spanish flu, which probably should have been called the Kansas Flu, which went from February 1918 to around April 1920, infecting about 500 million people (or about a third of the world's population). Somewhere between 20 million and 50 million died during that pandemic, even as people said "it's just the flu." Up to 60000 people die in the US from the flu even today, but hey, "it's just the flu" seems to be the dismissive way we ignored the warnings 100 years ago, and today.

The book is also an exploration of science, broad strokes on how we discover new ideas, hypothesize and test those ideas, and form theories of phenomena and solutions to problems. Discovery is rarely a straight line, yet we see only the end result, often ignoring all the hard work that goes into that end. There are many, many failures for every success, in science and pretty much everywhere. Barry explores some of these failures and shows how they lead to our successes.

Of note, we still don't have a cure for influenza, 100 years later. We have yearly vaccinations to prime our bodies to fight off the influenza viruses, but that's not the same as having rid the world of small pox.