Welcome to Litsy!

San Antonio, Texas has had an outbreak of a particularly virulent & deadly form of flu & have been cut off from the outside world by a perimeter wall built around the city. Hundreds are dying every day & have to be buried in mass graves. Det Lily Harris works collating burial statistics & notices a body that doesn't seem to have been autopsied & a bullet wound suggests that this is a murder victim hidden amongst the other dead.

“The world is not as it should be. It is a place of chaos and fear.”

I would use this book if it aligned with the curriculum and the topic for that week

I‘m not too familiar with the yellow fever epidemic so this was an interesting read for me. I liked how the story was portrayed

I previously read a fascinating book about the 2014 Ebola outbreak from a physician, but this one goes deeper. Farmer starts with that event then goes deeper into the past to show how Sierra Leone and Liberia came to be health care deserts via colonialism. You then comes forward again to show how radically different things could be with just basic supportive care. Terrific and sobering.

Assumed it was a COVID novel: nope, published in 2010!
A pandemic orphan, Cole is fostered by a fundamentalist pastor & his wife. They are good, kind people but their values and culture are poles apart from those of his liberal atheist parents. What's a boy to do when he loves them both?
The stuff about rapture children made me deeply uneasy.
Don't know why some of the plot points were introduced. Not sure how I feel about such a low key ending..

Listening to this 22 hr audiobook is an investment but one that pays dividends. Farmer, a doctor on the frontlines of the 2014 Ebola crisis, writes about the history of Sierra Leone and Liberia from the slave trade and founding of these countries to the current politics and extractive trading. He explains why these countries are healthcare deserts from a historical perspective and gives ideas how we can better prepare for the next health crisis.

So you may have noticed I haven‘t written an audiobook review in awhile. I‘m still listening to them, but I‘m not enjoying it as much. With all the aides coming and going, I rarely get uninterrupted listening time anymore. However, I decided to leap into a super-long (22 hour) one about the 2013-15 Ebola outbreak and an sociological history of those countries, and I‘m really enjoying it! It‘s a bit slow going, but maybe I‘ll love audio again!

This book is a fascinating look at the 1918 flu, focusing on the US and taking the time to set the stage in politics and medicine before the pandemic occurred. It‘s eminently readable and I didn‘t want to put it down. I do feel like it left a couple threads hanging, but that didn‘t take away from the book for me.

Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world‘s population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.🍻🍺

#quotes