Thanks Netgally for my advanced copy.

I don't think the writing style was for me. I found this really wordy and a bit manic. The time lines for each section kept going backwards and forwards and I generally don't like flipping backwards and forwards with times and places. It was interesting enough, but I just found the writing didn't intrigue me enough.

This book was an excellent historical and, often scientific look at plagues throughout history. It was interesting and informative without being dry or boring. This would be a great addition to a World History class.

I found this timely reading during our pandemic and found this book utterly fascinating from Chaper 1. All you need for a plague to go pandemic are population clusters and travellers spreading the bacterial or viral pathogens. Many prehistoric civilisations died fast, leaving cities undamaged to mystify archeologists. Plague in Athens killed 30% of the population 430-426 BCE. When Roman Emperor Justinian I caught bubonic plague in 541 CE, contemporary historian Procopius described his symptoms: fever, delirium and buboes – large black swellings of the lymphatic glands in the groin, under the arms and behind the ears. That bubonic plague killed 25 million people around the Mediterranean. Later dubbed Black Death, it killed 50 million people 1346-1353, returning to London 40 times in the next 300 years. The third bubonic plague pandemic started 1894 in China, claiming 15 million lives, largely in Asia, before dying down in the 1950s after visiting San Francisco and New York. But it also hit Madagascar in 2014, and the Congo and Peru. The cause, yersinia pestis was identified in 1894. Infected fleas from rats on merchant ships were blamed for spreading it, but Porton Down scientists have a worrying explanation why the plague spread so fast.

Any disease can go epidemic. Everyday European infections brought to the Americas by Cortes’ conquistadores killed millions of the natives, whose posthumous revenge was the syphilis the Spaniards brought back to Europe. The mis-named Spanish ’flu, brought from Kansas to Europe by US troops in 1918 caused more than 50 million deaths. Fifty years later, H3N2 ’flu from Hong Kong killed more than a million people.

One coronavirus produces the common cold, for which neither vaccine nor cure has been found, despite the loss of millions of working days each year. That other coronavirus, Covid-19 was NOT the worst pandemic. Chillingly, historian Douglas Boyd lists many other sub-microscopic killers still waiting for tourism and trade to bring them to us. Scary stuff!

Well written and researched compact book with lots of info I haven't read elsewhere. Really puts covid in perspective. I think this book will appeal to a casual reader who might be interested in past, and present plagues and pandemics, that have declare war on us with greater frequency than one would think. Well done, Douglas Boyd!

Overall, the book was not bad, 2.5 stars really. I made it about halfway through the book and stopped reading about the Plague, as the information was by far too detailed and too much weight was given to alternate hypotheses about the causative agent. I jumped ahead to after the Plague discussion, and found that the book got better, although there were several inaccurate statements. I also found the writing uninspiring but the subject matter was fascinating. The discussion of COVID-19 was very good but the author’s editorial comments were out of place. Thank you to Netgalley and Pen & Sword History for the advance reader copy.

I received this book for free for an honest review from netgalley #netgalley

Very intriguing and interesting.

I received an advance copy of, Plagues and Pandemics, by Douglas Boyd. Illness, plagues, and pandemics have been around since the dawn of time. So many illnesses took so many lives. This book is a good lesson in history on plagues and pandemics.

Probably not the best book to read when we are still technically in the middle of a global pandemic ourselves but I did enjoy learning about history's plagues and pandemics. There were more than I realized.