The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years [Kindle Edition] Author: Sonia Shah | Language: English | ISBN:
B003R0LBT4 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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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, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, 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 1 million of them?
In The Fever, the journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer these questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives. Through the centuries, she finds, we’ve invested our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, and invariably those hopes have been 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. With distinguished prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, devastating history of this long-standing thorn in the side of humanity.
Books with free ebook downloads available The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years
- File Size: 554 KB
- Print Length: 320 pages
- Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books; Reprint edition (July 6, 2010)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B003R0LBT4
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #198,606 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #25 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Microbiology
- #25 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Microbiology
- #25 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Specialties > Pathology > Forensic Medicine
I was excited when I saw the title of this book (one of my biggest problems with Guns, Germs, and Steel was how little focus Jared Diamond gave to the effects of malaria on societal development), but the more I read this book the more frustrated I become. Almost every page has at least one minor error, and many pages contain blatant errors regarding the fundamental biology that any competent editor should have discovered. My favorite howler: "Then again, 10 percent of the parasite's five thousand proteins retain their algaelike chemistry and remnant chloroplasts." A chloroplast is an organelle (large, complicated structure) in plant cells; to say that a protein contains "remnant chloroplasts" is utterly nonsensical.
The greatest misunderstanding comes from her "story of the evolution of malaria" in which P. falciparum (the most deadly of the 4 major plasmodium species) is presented as the latest evolutionary trick in a long line of a heavily-personified malaria species. If we take Ms. Shah's account, P. vivax emerged first, was defeated by the Duffy antigen in the African population and thereby forced into Europe to find new populations to destroy (such hyperbole is distressingly common in this book). Humans "invading the rain forest" (habitat destruction often results in contact with novel infectious diseases, but in this book serves as a trope in which habitat destruction inevitably leads to outbreaks of falciparum malaria and is a not so subtle way of pushing a particular viewpoint on her readership). In fact, P. falciparum has plagued humans since we split from the chimpanzee lineage, so it hardly qualifies as "new" - Ms. Shah implies that it has only been around for the last 4,000 years.
"Vivid" and "compelling" gushes E. Kolbert on the back jacket; "Fascinating... elegant... superbly well researched...poignant and important" intones N. Munk; "extremely well researched... gripping. Highly recommended" concludes malariologist B. Knols. With such lavish praise, this is a book to read: malaria after all IS a thoroughly fascinating subject.
Well, to me all adjectives sound in a way true, but as ironic commentary to a poorly written book. It's a shame, for Ms Shah's personality, as it shimmers through the text, is engaging. She is enthusiastic about her subject, and had certainly gone to great lengths to read up the material - alas, she appears overwhelmed by the task of synthesis, and she has been given thoroughly bad advice about how to approach her readership.
Not trusting readers with complex matters Ms Shah foregoes a proper description of the parasites and their life cycle. Visual aids are eschewed. The spread of P. vivax and P. falciparum across the world has had a major impact on history - yet no map facilitates our understanding on the main thrusts. Readers are easily bored, she surmises, so words are qualified for effect: huts are dank, highlands are rugged, dreams are sad, ships are fine, particularly when it is a "flotilla of ships" (pg. 51) and natives... must be "local natives" (pg. 50). Anthropomorphic images are plentiful: "... malarial parasites munching on the hemoglobin" (pg. 44); parasites "rely on strategies..." (pg. 28); "malaria parasites teem with purpose inside the veins of the house sparrows" (pg. 19). Hyperbole is a stock of trade: "Once, the powerful men in the House of Parliament quaked in their boots at the thought of the mosquito's wrath" (pg. 172). And of course: "...
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