Sonia Shah is a 47-year-old independent journalist who has already written a series of interesting books including Between Fear and Hope: A Decade of Peace Activism (1992), Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (1999), Crude: The Story of Oil (Seven Stories Press, 2004), The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients (New Press, 2006), and The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (Picador, 2011).  --  This year she published Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).  --  In a review published in the New York Review of Books in June, malaria expert Annie Sparrow said that while the publication of her book might seem opportunistic, given the recent Zika outbreak, in fact Shah's work "represents six years’ work and considerable prescience."[1]  --  Essentially, Shah explains, civilization is the cause of pandemics.  --  (Particularly Christian civilization, since "Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews all have built hygiene into their daily rituals, but Christianity is remarkable for its lack of prescribed sanitary practices.")  --  Civilization brings about the "unnatural confinement and proximity" of animals, which "provides pathogens with the opportunities not only to mutate rapidly but also to jump species."  --  "[D]evelopment, urbanization, and population growth transform harmless animal microbes into human pathogens. . . . the environment -- biological, social, political, and economic -- is both the source and driver of today’s emerging diseases."  --  "Pandemics are caused by zoonoses -- diseases that 'jump' from animals to humans.  --  Historically, this was a slow process, requiring considerable personal contact.  --  Malaria took millennia to make the leap from primates to mankind.  --  About ten thousand years ago, the dawn of agriculture and the domestication of livestock led to new levels of intimacy between humans and animals, which encouraged the emergence of our most familiar microbes.  --  Cows gave us measles and TB; pigs gave us pertussis; ducks gave us influenza."  --  In other words, it's just natural selection doing its usual thing.  --  Such pathogens play a wider role than is generally realized.  --  "Many of our most familiar diseases are set off or directly caused by pathogens.  --  Viruses lie behind at least 25 percent of all cancers.  --  Cervical cancer, for example, the second-most-common cancer among women worldwide, is caused by human papillomavirus (HPV).  --  Infestation by the bacteria Helicobacter pylori is a common cause of ulcers, but also causes gastric cancer and lymphoma.  --  Epstein-Barr virus causes Burkitt’s lymphoma, leukemia, and gastric, breast, and ovarian cancer.  --  Hepatitis B and C cause liver cancer.  --  Herpes virus can cause brain tumors and Kaposi’s sarcoma.  --  Even psychiatric diseases are linked to pathogens:  a few years after influenza outbreaks, schizophrenia is more commonly diagnosed."  --  Another theme of Shah's book is that governments (another product of civilization) have not been good at facing up to pandemics.  --  In the present context, it is important to know that "The structure of the World Health Organization . . . lends itself to giving priority to governmental preferences over public health needs."  --  "Shah’s book should be required reading for anyone working in global health," Sparrow concludes, emphasizing the importance of vaccination campaigns, particularly universal measles vaccination, and inveighing against "the false and financially motivated connection made in 1998 between the measles vaccine and autism has permanently damaged the eradication effort." ...

A banker who last year published a book that took as its subject Winston Churchill's finances and which was reviewed in June in the New York Review of Books said that "I have never encountered risk-taking on Churchill’s scale."[1]  --  In general, writes reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcraft, in his private affairs Churchill "defied every idea of sanctity of contract, or even of gentlemanly behavior."  --  "[H]e was spendthrift beyond imagining."  --  "[H]e was always years behind with his cigar merchant’s accounts, as with those of every other tradesman."  --  In the period 1929-1937 when Churchill was out of politics, he turned his home at Chartwell into a "a veritable word factory, with a team of researchers and ghostwriters, notably Edward Marsh, a fastidious civil servant and patron of the arts, and an obscure journalist, Adam Marshall Diston"; even the preface to his Thoughts and Adventures was ghost-written.  --  Also reviewed by Wheatcraft is a biography of Churchill's wife, Clementine, revealing that "at the height of the [World W]ar [II] the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was sleeping with the prime minister’s daughter, and the president’s special envoy was sleeping with the prime minister’s daughter-in-law.  --  Special relationships indeed.  --  The ambassador was Gil Winant, a former Republican governor of New Hampshire, a very popular replacement for the old monster Joseph Kennedy.   --  He discreetly took up with Sarah, [Churchill's 30-year-old daughter]."  --  The other relationship referred to was Pamela Churchill, the wife of Churchill's son Randolph, and Averill Harriman, the Democratic power broker; Harriman and Pamela Churchill would ultimately marry, in 1971, and Pamela Harriman remained an important player in Democratic party politics to the end of her life, serving as Bill Clinton's U.S. ambassador to France in 1993-1997.  --  From the two books, "a sharp dissonance emerges between Churchill as the jovial bulldog of popular American imagination and the somber reality of a life scarred by bitterness and tragedy:  in all, suicides close to Churchill included a brother-in-law, a former stepfather, a daughter’s estranged lover, a former daughter-in-law, a son-in-law, and a daughter."  --  Clementine was ultimately hospitalized for depression.  --  Nevertheless, Churchill's historical importance is indubitable, and he "abides still, a vast looming presence, defying the biographer, his greatness matched by his meanness, his nobility by his brutality, his courage by his rapacity; 'the man of the century,' and as elusive as ever." ...

Life's Greatest Secret, a 2015 work about the development of modern genetics, was reviewed in the New York Review of Books recently by H. Allen Orr of the Univ. of Rochester.  --  Orr's review puts in historical context the recent development of powerful CRISPR technologies over the past few years, techniques that permit efficient reformatting of any genetic code, and thus astonishingly precise genetic engineering.  --  In the fact that information theory contributed nothing to the development of modern genetics, Prof. Orr finds support for the notion that the genetic code as it exists is an almost completely arbitrary construct:  "a half-decent arrangement arrived at by the imperfect, tinkering process of evolution by natural selection and, once settled on, it couldn’t be 'improved,' or made somehow more systematic.  --  In such a situation theory is likely useless."[1]  --  Life's greatest secret, it would appear, is a message from an idiot...