“In Senegal it was the Brazilian flu and in Brazil the German flu, while the Danes thought it ‘came from the south’,” Spinney writes. Spinney’s global perspective is welcome, not least in her description of how people talked about the pandemic, which though it is now called the “Spanish” flu was circulating in the United States for at least two months before it showed up in Spain. This book is a fantastic global, historical overview of the 1918 Great Flu pandemic –which killed my great-grandfather– and its aftermath and impact on population and health trends, public policy, attitudes toward science, living habits, religion, literature, art, diplomacy, and even on historical memory itself. PALE RIDER: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. The important thing is that these four books hold key insights into what’s going on today with political and economic tensions, what got us here, how the pandemic and our reactions to it might shape the future, and how to face with alacrity the challenges the world throws at us. Plus, I confess to taking a bit of poetic license with the description of this list since I read some of these before summer started. After all, Chicago beaches are closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Spoiler alert: My summer book list is not exactly beach reading.
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