What with the COVID-19 pandemic being the overwhelmingly dominant topic of news reporting, opinion journalism, and public discussion for over a year now, and with all three of these being vulnerable to errors ranging in origin from insufficient information or understanding to outrightly malicious disinformation, I have been trying to find and put forward books that are both reasonably up-to-date as well as accessible to an interested but not medically trained readership.
My thought process, as it most often is, is that by providing awareness of, and direction to, well-written and scientifically sound information, at least some of the ignorance (meaning simply here a state of being in which knowledge is lacking in regard to a particular subject), uncertainty, and confusion surrounding viruses, outbreaks, and disease immunity may be alleviated, improved understanding achieved, and the dangers posed by a population left vulnerable to manipulation or panic as the result of the fear that often follows close upon a lack of useful knowledge and understanding at least in some small way lessened.
It’s a tall order to be sure, but as I subscribe to the Loraxian maxim of “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot / Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” I believe we all need to do what we can, and telling the world about books is what I can do. Which is why I recently published a featured review of a very helpful, relatively short, and well-written introduction to pandemics and their history from the Oxford University Press‘ Very Short Introductions series, and why I now am calling attention to another book that takes up the subject of viruses and pandemics, but to this adds another related topic that has more recently moved to the forefront of the public discourse regarding COVID-19: immunity.
Viruses, Pandemics, and Immunity by Dr. Arup K. Chakraborty, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Physics and Chemistry at MIT, where he also served as the Founding Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and Dr. Andrey S. Shaw, the Staff Scientist in Immunology and Oncology at Genentech who also holds adjunct professorships at Washington University in St. Louis and at the University of California, San Francisco, was just published this past February by MIT Press.
Written in a style that is very accessible to anyone with a minimum of a secondary school level understanding of biology and mathematics, and supported by helpful illustrations created by Philip J. S. Stork, this valuable book provides clear and straightforward explanations of all the hot topic words and concepts that have been filling the headlines this past year – from what viruses and pandemics are, to how diagnostic testing is performed and why, to what vaccines and antiviral therapies are and how they work, to thirty-four pages presenting all the pertinent details of the grand prize we’ve all been hoping to win both individually and collectively: immunity.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on us all, not only because of the physical and economic damage it has inflicted but also because of the emotional chaos it has caused. Some of the most talented people in the world are and have been toiling ceaselessly in an attempt to mitigate the physical and economic havoc, but the emotional remediation is partly up to us. I’ve long found that emotional chaos is often quieted by a better understanding of what was happening, and this little book goes a long way toward providing that very thing to all who take the time to read it.
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