Book Review: FLU: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It (OT)

FLU: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It, by Gina Kolata (Simon & Schuster, 2001, $14.00 PB, 352pp)

Oh, wow, what a great read! Non-fiction that reads like fiction: you just can't put it down and end up taking it with you wherever you go for a few days, but only a few days because that's all it takes to devour this book. And I wound up with two copies, lucky me. One to keep and one to give away.

Written just before COVID-19 (remember that?), FLU is a short 300-page history of  a disease called influenza or flu for short - and other pandemics (world-wide illnesses that are often fatal since humans do not have the capability to fight a new disease yet).  But it is also a thriller - a play by play account of scientists trying to beat each other to the prize* - finding the culprit from the 1918  pandemic, albeit frozen hopefully so you can compare the original to today's version, after evolving.

And vaccines. . . . "Better a vaccine without an epidemic than an epidemic without a vaccine." (p 139)

You will learn what H1N2** means so that you don't forget it plus you will learn about flu's eight genes and why it evolves in a major way every 10 years or so - think, Swine flu, bird flu, the Hong Kong flu. With 10 chapters, you will love how the author leaves you hanging at the end of every chapter, trying to figure out if you have time to read the next chapter because she has left you with only clues about what happens next. 

My only wish is that author Gina Kolata would follow this story up with another, bringing us up to date with the last 20 or 25 years of flu evolution. She is an imminently readable author.

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*this book is reminiscent of The Double Helix,

another very readable science book, this one about the 1950s race to discover the structure of DNA (basically between Watson-Crick and Linus Pauling).

** hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, the two proteins on the outside of the virus, one which helps the virus break into a host cell and one that helps it break back out once it has replicated. And the numerals stand for major evolutionary changes.