The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years Hardcover – July 6, 2010 Author: Visit Amazon's Sonia Shah Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0374230013 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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From Publishers Weekly
This fascinating, mordant pop-sci account tells us why malaria is one of the world™s greatest scourges, killing a million people every year and debilitating another 300 million, and why we have remained complacent about it. Journalist Shah (The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs in the World™s Poorest Patients) shows how the Plasmodium parasite, entering through a mosquito™s bite and feasting on human red blood cells, has altered human history by destroying armies, undermining empires, and driving changes in our very genome. We™ve learned to fight back with antimalarial drugs and insecticides, but malaria™s adaptability and its buzzing vector, Shah notes, give it the upper hand. Shah provides an intricate and lucid rundown of the biology and ecology of malaria, but her most original insights concern the ways in which human society accommodates and abets the parasite. (The impoverished denizens of Africa™s malaria belt, she observes, would sometimes rather use the pesticide-laced bed nets sent by Western aid groups to catch fish.) Shah™s is an absorbing account of human ingenuity and progress, and of their heartbreaking limitations. 16 pages of b&w illus.
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From Booklist
Investigative journalist Shah maintains her signature pattern (Crude, 2004; The Body Hunters, 2006) here, exposing both the seemly and not-so-seemly aspects of the subject under review. As Shah demonstrates, when it comes to taming, never mind eradicating, malaria, the disease is cannily able to keep the ball in humankind's court. Notwithstanding, people in tropical climes who live with its ubiquitous presence have over time come to uneasy terms with the fever. That is not to say they would not benefit from a cure. Indeed, their need is most critical. It's just that when Western nontropical humans are exposed to malaria, they suffer its worst effects, then tackle the problem in largely ineffectual ways. And it is not for want of money (think Bill and Melinda Gates). But Shah takes no prisoners, blasting everyone, including the World Health Organization. Even Harvard's state-of-the art Malaria Initiative takes it on the chin for eschewing unglamorous but effectual grunt work in favor of “lavishly funded . . . economy building technology.” Malaria may rule humankind, but Shah rules the in-depth investigative report. --Donna Chavez
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- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books; First Edition edition (July 6, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0374230013
- ISBN-13: 978-0374230012
- Product Dimensions: 1.1 x 6.3 x 9.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #286,635 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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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