Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

Shah, Sonia

ISBN 10: 0312573014 / ISBN 13: 9780312573010

Published by Picador, 2011

The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine. Seller Inventory # GOR013699158

Synopsis:

"[A] tour-de-force." --The New York Times

"The Fever is a vivid and compelling history with a message that's entirely relevant today." --Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

Renowned science journalist Sonia Shah explores the surprising history of a disease that has haunted humanity since long before the pandemics of our own time.

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names--and opened their pocketbooks--in hopes of curing the disease. Still, at a time when the newly emergent COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the high cost of public health failures into stark relief, why aren't we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we've known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly one million of them?

In The Fever, prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer these questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its effect on human history. Over the centuries, she finds, we've placed our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, only to find them dashed. From the settling of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wars and the advances of the Industrial Revolution, Shah tracks malaria's jagged ascent and the tragedies in its wake, revealing a parasite every bit as persistent as the insects that carry it.

Combining lucid prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, utterly devastating history of one of humanity's most dogged foes--yielding essential lessons for our own time.

About the Author: Sonia Shah is a science journalist and the prize-winning author of Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library Award for Excellence in Journalism. She has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many others. Her TED talk, "Three Reasons We Still Haven't Gotten Rid of Malaria," has been viewed by more than one million people around the world. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for ...
Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: 2011
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good