Pathogenesis A history of the world in eight plagues

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Revisiting the theme of William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples (1976), sociologist and public health scholar Kennedy debuts with a virtuoso analysis of the fallout from encounters between deadly viral and bacterial pathogens and human populations that lacked immunity. Looking back to prehistory, he argues that Homo sapiens supplanted Eurasian Neanderthals 40,000 years ago by virtue of pathogens they brought from Africa, not superior intelligence. Elsewhere, he contends that epidemics depopulated the Roman Empire and led to the rise of Christianity and Islam, while the Black Death initiated Britain's transition from feudalism to capitalism. A smallpox epidemic allowed Hernan Cortés to conquer the immunologically naive Aztec Empire in 1520, but Africa's endemic malaria killed Europeans so quickly that they were unable to colonize the continent until quinine became available in the 19th century. And while modern sanitation and medicine have triumphed over cholera and other pathogens, Covid-19 highlighted the "stark inequalities" that still result in millions of poor and marginalized people dying each year from preventable infections. Though there's a one-size-fits-all aspect to Kennedy's thesis that disease-bearing microbes are responsible for the modern world, he marshals a wealth of surprising scholarship in lucid and succinct prose. The result is a fascinating look at history from the perspective of its tiniest protagonists. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Apr.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

In The Long Reckoning, award-winning investigative journalist Black (The Good Neighbor) chronicles the efforts of U.S. veterans, scientists, and pacifists and their Vietnamese partners to compel the U.S. government to acknowledge the ongoing damage done by unexploded munitions and the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, particularly in the demilitarized zone. From notable U.S.-based Dutch writer/editor Buruma (The Churchill Complex), The Collaborators examines three figures seen as either heroes or traitors during World War II: Hasidic Jew Friedrich Weinreb, who took money to save fellow Jews but betrayed some of them to the Gestapo; Manchu princess Kawashima Yoshiko, who spied for the Japanese secret police in China; and masseur Felix Kersten, who claimed to have talked Himmler out of killing thousands. Oxford associate professor Healey's The Blazing World portrays 17th-century England as a turbulent society undergoing revolutionary change. A professor of politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London, Kennedy argues in Pathogenesis that it was not human guts and ingenuity but the power of disease-delivering microbes that has driven human history, from the end of the Neanderthals to the rise of Christianity and Islam to the deadly consequences of European colonialism (75,000-copy first printing). Continuing in the vein of his New York Times best-selling The Princess Spy, Loftis introduces us to Corrie ten Boom, The Watchmaker's Daughter, who helped her family hide Jews and refugees from the Gestapo during World War II (100,000-copy first printing). Mar's Seventy Times Seven chronicles Black 15-year-old Paula Cooper's murder of septuagenarian white woman Ruth Pelke in a violent home invasion in 1985 Gary, IN; her subsequent death sentence; and what happened when Pelke's grandson forgave her. Journalist/consultant Roberts fully reveals the Untold Power of Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, who effectively acted as president when her husband was incapacitated. A best seller in the UK when it was published in 2021, Sanghera's Empireland--an exploration of the legacy of British imperialism in the contemporary world--has been contextualized for U.S. audiences and carries an introduction by Marlon James. In Benjamin Banneker and Us, Webster explores the life of her forbear, the Black mathematician and almanac writer who surveyed Washington, DC, for Thomas Jefferson, and his descendants to highlight how structural racism continues to shape our understanding of lineage and family.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

World history through the eyes of microbes. Bacteria may be microscopic and easy to disregard, writes Kennedy, a professor of politics and global health, but they're ubiquitous and astonishingly prolific--outweighing humankind, for one thing, by 1,000 times in terms of total mass. However, along with viruses, bacteria shape the fortunes of all life on Earth. It's hardly news that this includes the course of human history. In 1976, William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples made a strong case for the radically important role of disease in the rise and fall of civilizations and as a significant force in propelling innovation and warfare. Kennedy's book is in some ways redundant, but it is well grounded scientifically and draws on recent literature to examine, for instance, the effect of disease on the eventual hegemony of Homo sapiens over other early humans. If "for early humans, the Eastern Mediterranean region must have seemed like a cursed realm, the Paleolithic equivalent of Tolkien's Mordor," the arrival of human-borne pathogens into Neanderthal populations must have been even more deadly. Plagues in third-century Rome helped an obscure offshoot of Judaism gain supremacy over pantheistic religions whose gods, by allowing such calamities, were proven weak; without those murderous bacteria, Christianity might never have established itself. Kennedy charts the interaction of climate change with disease--the reappearance, for example, of the bubonic plague after a long absence as the Northern Hemisphere warmed and pest-bearing rodents proliferated, just in time for the Mongol Empire to spread the pandemic through its widespread raids--and he helps puzzle out a long-standing mystery concerning the Columbian conquests: "How do we explain the almost unilateral flow of pathogens from Europe to the Americas?" The answer is nuanced but reveals a great deal about how so many great Native American empires were so quickly subdued. Of interest to students of world history, with lessons to ponder for our own pandemic-hobbled time. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 Paleolithic Plagues History makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology. --E. O. Wilson Rediscovering Middle-earth The idea of a world inhabited by multiple human and humanoid species will be familiar to readers of fantasy literature. Take, for example, the Fellowship that accompanies Frodo Baggins on his journey to dispose of the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom. Aragorn and Boromir are Men, a term used to denote both male and female humans. Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin are Hobbits, closely related to Men but roughly half as tall and with oversized, furry feet. Then there is Legolas, a slender and pointy-eared Elf with a superhuman sense of sight and hearing. And Gimli is a Dwarf, belonging to the short, thick-set warrior-like people who live in the mountains of Middle-earth. J. R. R. Tolkien did not create this legendarium from scratch. His fantasy world was strongly influenced by the Germanic mythology that he studied in his day job, as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. This is why Tolkien claimed to have discovered rather than invented Middle-earth. Over the last two decades, researchers have uncovered an array of evidence that has transformed our knowledge of the world that early humans inhabited. New archeological discoveries, combined with advances in the technology used to analyze the DNA retrieved from ancient skeletons, clearly demonstrate that for most of the time Homo sapiens has been around--from about 300,000 to 50,000 years ago--the planet resembled Tolkien's Middle-earth or a Norse saga more than the world we occupy today. Although our ancestors didn't live alongside Hobbits, Elves and Dwarves, they shared the earth with a rich cast of human species. Geneticists estimate that our last common ancestor with chimpanzees dates to between 6 and 8 million years ago. Just over 3 million years ago, proto-humans were habitually walking on two legs but the size of their brains and bodies had hardly changed--as demonstrated by "Lucy," the female skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 by archeologists as they listened to the Beatles' song "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds." Homo erectus, or "upright man," appears in the fossil record about 2 million years ago. With relatively long legs, short arms and a large head, Homo erectus is the earliest example of a species that looks recognizably human. They were the first species of humans to migrate out of Africa, and within a relatively short period of time they managed to spread across much of the Old World. Their remains have been found near the southern tip of Africa, in the Caucuses, northern China and Java. Our own species evolved from Homo erectus. The first known skeletal remains with the modern anatomical features typical of Homo sapiens are the fossilized bones of five people who died some 100 kilometers from Marrakesh about 315,000 years ago. For most of the time since then, they remained more or less exclusively in Africa--although our ancestors' remains have been found everywhere from Morocco to the Cape. Homo sapiens wasn't the only species of humans living in the continent, however. There is both archeological and genetic evidence that we coexisted in Africa with a variety of other species of humans. Neanderthals also evolved from Homo erectus. They diverged from our own species between three-quarters and half a million years ago, when a group of archaic humans migrated out of Africa and ended up in Europe. Homo neanderthalensis retained so-called archaic features--that is, lower braincases, heavier brows and less prominent chins--all of which distinguish them from us anatomically modern humans. Neanderthals were also taller, heavier, stronger and had slightly bigger brains than Homo sapiens. Their fair skin helped them absorb sunlight--which is crucial for making vitamin D--and their large, frequently blue eyes enabled them to see in the dark European winter. Neanderthals eventually spread out over much of Western Eurasia; their remains have been found from Gibraltar in the west to the Altai Mountains in Siberia in the east. Over the last two decades, scientists have discovered several more species of humans that were alive at the same time as Homo sapiens. Denisovans split from Neanderthals not long after they'd ventured out of Africa and went on to occupy the eastern part of Eurasia. The only physical traces of this species are a few bone fragments uncovered in caves in the Altai Mountains and on the Tibetan plateau. Anatomically, Denisovans would have looked similar to Neanderthals although they appear to have had much bigger teeth, and they carried a number of gene mutations, including one that affected red blood cells and allowed them to live comfortably at high altitudes. Homo floresiensis lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. They are colloquially referred to as Hobbits on account of their height--they stood just over a meter tall--and disproportionately long feet. One theory suggests that Homo floresiensis is descended from Homo erectus, who arrived there about a million years ago and then became isolated by deep waters. Homo luzonensis is another extinct, small-bodied human species that was discovered in 2019 on the island of Luzon, in the Philippines. Their curved fingers and toe bones suggest that they retained the climbing abilities of our pre-human ancestors. So for the first quarter of a million years, Homo sapiens lived in Africa alongside other species of humans, and yet more species of human inhabited Europe and Asia. Then, between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago, something astonishing happened. Within a few thousand years, Homo sapiens burst out of Africa and quickly spread across the world--from western Europe all the way to Australia. At the same time, all other species of human vanished from the face of the earth. The most recent trace of Homo luzonensis and Homo floresiensis is from 50,000 years ago. The last evidence of Denisovans dates to between 49,000 and 43,000 years ago, although they may have held out in isolated parts of New Guinea for longer. Neanderthals appear to have survived until between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago. The expansion of Homo sapiens and disappearance of other species fundamentally transformed the planet and laid the foundations for the world we inhabit today. Why this happened is one of the biggest mysteries of human prehistory. Excerpted from Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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