The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis
10 best books like The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (Thomas Dormandy): Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis, Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, Floods, Famines, And Emperors: El Nino And The Fate Of Civilizations, The Invention of Clouds, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603, The Thieves' Opera, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918
Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
The astonishing, hitherto unknown truths about a disease that transformed the United States at its birth
A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian...
| Author | Paul A. Offit |
| ISBN | 0300126050 |
Vaccines have saved more lives than any other single medical advance. Yet today only four companies make vaccines, and there is a growing crisis in vaccine availability. Why has this happened? This remarkable book recounts for the first time a devastating episode in 1955 at Cutter Laboratories in...
| Author | Helen Bynum |
| ISBN | 0199542058 |
Tuberculosis is characterized as a social disease and few have been more inextricably linked with human history. There is evidence from the archaeological record that Mycobacterium tuberculosis and its human hosts have been together for a very long time. The very mention of tuberculosis brings...
| Author | Seth Rosenfeld |
| ISBN | 0374257000 |
Subversives traces the FBI’s secret involvement with three iconic figures who clashed at Berkeley during the 1960s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal university president Clark Kerr. Through these converging narratives,...
Floods, Famines, And Emperors: El Nino And The Fate Of Civilizations
| Author | Brian M. Fagan |
| ISBN | 0465011217 |
In 1997 and early 1998, one of the most powerful El Niños ever recorded disrupted weather patterns all over the world. Europe suffered through a record freeze as the American West was hit with massive floods and snowstorms; in the western Pacific, meanwhile, some island nations literally went bone...
| Author | Richard Hamblyn |
| ISBN | 0374177155 |
The Invention of Clouds is the true story of Luke Howard, the amateur English meteorologist who in 1802 gave the clouds their names -- cumulus, cirrus, stratus. He immediately gained international fame, becoming a cult figure among artists and painters -- Goethe, Constable, and Coleridge revered...
| Author | Susan Brigden |
| ISBN | 0142001252 |
No period in British history has more resonance and mystery today than the sixteenth century. New Worlds, Lost Worlds brings the atmosphere and events of this great epoch to life. Exploring the underlying religious motivations for the savage violence and turbulence of the period-from Henry VIII's...
| Author | Lucy Moore |
| ISBN | 0156006405 |
Georgian London was a city of extraordinary contrast: its elegance and refinement thrived amid appalling filth and foul smells, decadence and depravity. Crime was everywhere, from pickpockets and prostitutes to murderous highwaymen, as London bulged with riches from its overseas colonies. The...
| Author | Rick Wartzman |
| ISBN | 1586483315 |
Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation’s number one bestseller, but in Kern County, California—the Joads’ newfound home—the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene...
| Author | Alfred W. Crosby |
| ISBN | 0521541751 |
Between August 1918 and March 1919 the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives, more people than those perished in the fighting of the First World War. It proved fatal to at least a half-million Americans. Yet, the Spanish flu pandemic is largely forgotten today. In this...
| Author | Azar Gat |
| ISBN | 0199262136 |
In this truly global study, major military historian Azar Gat sets out to unravel the "riddle of war" throughout human history, from the early hunter-gatherers right through to the unconventional terrorism of the twenty-first century. In the process, the book generates an astonishing wealth of...
| Author | Norman Stone |
| ISBN | 0500290385 |
A virtuoso performance by historian Norman Stone, who has lived and worked in the country since 1997, this concise survey of Turkeys relations with its immediate neighbours and the wider world from the 11th century to the present day. Stone deftly conducts the reader through this story, from the arrival...
Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation
| Author | Charles Barber |
| ISBN | 0375423990 |
Public perceptions of mental health issues have changed dramatically over the last fifteen years, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the rampant overmedication of ordinary Americans. In 2006, 227 million antidepressant prescriptions were dispensed in the United States, more than any other...
Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game
| Author | Peter Hopkirk |
| ISBN | 0472086340 |
This book is for all those who love Kim, the masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game, the centuries-old power struggle between Russia and Great Britain in the depths of Central Asia. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy's recruitment into...
The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846
| Author | Charles Grier Sellers |
| ISBN | 0195089200 |
This is certainly an interesting book, if you can manage to make your way all the way through. His basic premise is that the United States possessed a pre-capitalist economy before the War of 1812 populated by tradition-bound yeoman who toiled on the land for subsistence living. After the conflict concluded...
Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive That Changed the World
| Author | Jack Kelly |
| ISBN | 0465037224 |
When Chinese alchemists fashioned the first manmade explosion sometime during the tenth century, no one could have foreseen its full revolutionary potential. Invented to frighten evil spirits rather than fuel guns or bombs—neither of which had been thought of yet—their simple mixture of saltpeter,...
| Author | Elaine Showalter |
| ISBN | 0231104596 |
This provocative and illuminating book charts the persistence of a cultural phenomenon. Tales of alien abduction, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, and the resurgence of repressed memories in psychotherapy are just a few of the signs that we live in an age of hysterical epidemics.
As...
| Author | Mark A. Kishlansky |
| ISBN | 0140148272 |
The seventeenth century, writes Mark Kishlansky, was "a wheel of transformation in perpetual motion," a period of political and religious upheaval that defined the nation for decades to come and remains critical for understanding the nation today.
Beginning with the accession of James...
| Author | Robert H. Wiebe |
| ISBN | 0809001047 |
At the end of Reconstruction, the lives of most Americans were still controlled by the values of the village, the conventional 19th-century beliefs in individualism, laissez-faire, progress, and a divinely ordained social system. But in the last decades of the century, the spread of science and...
The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830
| Author | Thomas S. Ashton |
| ISBN | 0192892894 |
The Industrial Revolution has sometimes been regarded as a catastrophe which desecrated the English landscape and brought social oppression and appalling physical hardship to the workers. In Ashton's classic account, however, it is presented as an important and beneficial mark of progress. In...
Delirium: The Politics of Sex in America
| Author | Nancy L. Cohen |
| ISBN | 1619020688 |
“Perhaps if the Pill had never been invented, American politics would be very different today,” Nancy L. Cohen writes in her prescient new book, Delirium: The Politics of Sex in America
The 2012 election was supposed to be about the economy, but over the last few months it turned into a debate...
| Author | Todd Tucker |
| ISBN | 0743270304 |
What does it feel like to starve? To feel your body cry out for nourishment, to think only of food? How many fitful, hungry nights must pass before dreams of home-cooked meals metastasize into nightmares of cannibalism? Why would anyone volunteer to find out?
In The Great Starvation Experiment,...
| Author | David R. Goldfield |
| ISBN | 1596917024 |
In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown...
| Author | Simon Schama |
| ISBN | 1847920004 |
In November 2008 the United States will elect a new President. But the imminent collapse of twenty years of Republican conservativism means the country is already conducting an intense self-examination about the trajectory of its history; how it came to find itself in multiple crises and how an America...
| Author | Anthony Kaldellis |
| ISBN | 0190253223 |
In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests: first in the southeast against the Arabs, then in Bulgaria, and finally in the Georgian and Armenian lands. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. It...
