Review of- The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

WARNING: This review contains spoilers

I recently read The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History and this is my fairly short to and to the point review of it.

The Short Version:

The Great Influenza has moments of narrative brilliance, that are spaced out between chapters of fairly dull 10th grade biology class. Despite its shortcomings, I struggle to imagine a better single historical text that does this topic justice.

The Long Version:

The Great Influenza starts with a history of medicine. It tries to explain the field of medicine and its development through all of recorded history. This isn't as dull as it sounds, because it does touch on material that a non-medical person like me occasionally finds interesting. From there it covers the major medical/scientific minds of the era. I wanted to like this part of the book, some of the people portrayed are really interesting. However the book spends a lot of time explaining their histories up to the 1918 pandemic, and then provides few details afterwards on several of them. Obviously this is a historical text and not fiction, but still wish the author had circled back to these personalities and talked more about what they did later in life. We only hear later about the really successful ones who achieved great things in the field.

When it isn't stopping to explain what a virus is, John Barry's book does a great job of narrating the tale of this pandemic. It provides excellent context, explaining the impact that World War One had on the pandemic and how the state of public health and sanitation in cities made things even worse.

Perhaps the most shocking elements were the sheer speed of the virus. I had a vague sense that the 1918 Spanish Flu (the book points out how the name doesn't reflect the true origins of the virus) killed a lot of people over a span of a year or more. I was shocked to learn just how many people got sick and how many of them died in a manner of a few short weeks and months. The author did a good job of pointing out the shock of it all. The speed of the outbreaks, the speedy onset of symptoms (people dropping off their horses and falling down on sidewalks) and how the sheer number of infected completely overwhelmed hospitals, medical wards and medical staff.

I went into this book thinking, the field of medicine at the time was primitive by our standards and that affected the outcome. I was right, but John Barry's descriptions of what happened and how fast it happened convinced me very quickly that even today, a virus that was this easily spread and moved this fast, would overwhelm the bureaucratic world of medicine that exists today, in any first world country.

The book also explains how the context made things worse. I had no idea of the extent of information censorship and how much the wartime U.S. government was working to silence all critics and to mobilize the country to fight in the war. All of those efforts ran contrary to dealing with a virus and in many ways made things worse.

In the book there are singular moments that stand out. Like experts telling the people running the city of Philadelphia not to hold a giant war bond parade that will put hundreds of thousands of people in the streets in big crowds (with predicable results afterward). There is also a section depicting what is happening on a big military base, and how the Colonel, stricken with grief over the young soldiers dying all around him and his role in ignoring the threat, takes his own life.

These scenes give the book its emotional power and narrative. They pull you away from the chapters of dull biology and history lesson and put you in the moment. The descriptions of the pandemic as it was happening, what it was like, was both hard and enjoyable to read. It was hard to read because it did get graphic at times. But I wanted to plow through it and keep going. The narrative often hints at what's to come, both better and worse, and pulls you through the middle of the book.

Overall the middle of this book is where it's at. The beginning will bend you into a biology and history lesson. The end will leave you wondering what happened to some of the people introduced earlier and leave you with a satisfactory explanation of what happened (and what would happen if a disease like this struck our world today). Yet it fails to close the book on some of the "characters" it painstakingly introduces to you.

The middle of the book, the descriptions of the pandemic itself, read like a novel at times. Like the most tense parts of a disaster movie. Complete with scenes of clueless people making bad decisions that make everything worse, alongside heroes who throw themselves into the disaster trying to help.

The author points out that very little has been written about the pandemic of 1918. The authors of the following decades just didn't spend a lot of time here. I claim to be a history buff, but there was a lot in this book that I didn't know. Even other books of this era (such as books about World War One) just make references and move on.

As a history buff, I'm glad I read it. But it's not for everyone. Someone looking for a fun/lighthearted/funny read, look elsewhere. If you are looking for gripping real life drama about medicine, plagues, pandemics, or just want to understand this crucial aspect of World War One or the year/era of 1918, then I think this is a must-read if you can trudge through some of the broader-topic history and science lesson chapters to find the pearls within that will linger and maybe even haunt you long after you put the book down.