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| The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Paperback
Edition: 1
Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Release Date: 2007-10-02
ISBN-10: 1594482691
ISBN-13: 9781594482694
List Price: $15.00
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
A National Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and an Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year
It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure-garbage removal, clean water, sewers-necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action-and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time.
In a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories of the spread of disease, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.
Where has your drinking water been?
| Customer Rating: | The difficulty in reading about centuries past is adopting the mindset of those who lived then; how can we, with our 21st century knowledge, grasp a world in which people washed their babies' diapers next to the local drinking supply and thought nothing of it? Yet, Johnson weaves such a detailed picture of London life at the time that the commonplace miscomprehensions held by both the academics and uneducated are understandable. Johnson's greatest narrative gift is capturing the extent of the devastation and its commonplace nature in 19th century London, where people lived with the constant threat of epidemic.
The last fifth of the book is given over to Johnson's theorizing about the future of city planning, trying to tie it into the work of the pioneering researchers of the cholera outbreak. This non sequitur weakens the overall book, but only slightly. The mystery is real, the medical discoveries ingenious and Johnson's research and narrative compelling. |
a frightening lesson for us all
| Customer Rating: | | The Ghost Map describes a series of events more than a centory and a half ago, but the warnings are still timely. Crowding vast numbers or people together without proper sanitation and with primitive understanding of medicine is a deadly cocktail, and cholera the villain of the book is still frequent killer in the underdeveloped world. WE must all stay alert to te potential ravages of lethal diseases. The book is a sharp warning against complacency and at the same time a captivating good read. |
The Ghost Map
| Customer Rating: | A fascinating read, in fact, the story line that weaves the two main characters together, Snow and Whitehead, has an almost cinematic sense of drama especially set against the Dickensian squalor of mid nineteenth century London.
Dan Mandish |
Read this book and you'll have a new-found appreciation for toilets, clean water and water treatment plants
| Customer Rating: | | This book should make you appreciate how far public health and sanitation have come in the past 150 years. Did you know, most of modern society's gains in life expectancy precede major medical breakthroughs like antibiotics? You can thank improvements in water, sanitation and housing. This book highlights the inviolable fact that preventing someone else's poop from entering your mouth is a good thing. Thank God and John Snow for water treatment plants. |
Nothing Scary About Ghost Map
| Customer Rating: | | Steven Johnson's Ghost Map is the fascinating story of the beginning of modern public health. It highlights the desperate search for the cause of a London cholera epidemic in the 1850's. The book has the pace and readability of a medical thriller combined with strong science/invetigational story telling. While the science end of the story shines, the reader still feels the human suffering of this tragic event. I liked the book so much I bought multiple copies to give to other teachers. |
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