Flu : The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic
by Gina Kolata

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Book Reviews of Flu : The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic

Book Review: Deceptively titled
Summary: 3 Stars

There was one aspect of FLU that I did find notable, and that was a hint of gender bias on the part of the author towards the book's three principal "heroes": Dr. Johan Hultin, Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, and Dr. Kirsty Duncan. All three attempted to recover the 1918 virus from the lung tissue of victims that died from the disease. Hultin, a San Francisco pathologist, went looking for corpses of Eskimos buried in the Alaskan permafrost. Duncan, a geographer by profession, organized the exhumation of dead miners buried at Spitzbergen, Norway. Taubenberger, an MD/PhD researcher with the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, went rummaging among tissue samples preserved in paraffin blocks stored for decades at the institute. Kolata admiringly described the professional pedigrees and accomplishments of both Hultin and Taubenberger, but virtually ignored Duncan, except to infer that her "long hair and doe eyes and raw emotions" may have had an unsettling effect on the marriage of one of her team members. Oh, and that Duncan's own marriage broke up. (Was this relevant? Who cares?) Moreover, images of Hultin and Taubenberger hard at work are featured in the volume's too paltry section of photographs, but not Duncan. And, in the "Acknowledgements", the author thanks Hultin and Taubenberger for their "extraordinary assistance", but no gratitude, however lukewarm, is awarded Duncan. Do I perceive some cattiness here? Meow!

I found FLU marginally interesting, but it in no way met expectations. I wouldn't recommend buying it unless you're obsessed with the subject matter.