Some of the (re)reading I’ve enjoyed while sheltered; Rats, Lice and History (1935) by Hans Zinsser is, as advertised, a biography of typhus fever. However, Zinsser covers a lot of ground on his way to telling the life story of typhus. Who knew plagues, epidemics and pandemics could be so interesting? Disease has shortened or prevented many wars while simultaneously killing more soldiers than have died in or as a result of combat during all of recorded history. But it isn’t all doom and gloom. Zinsser sometimes digresses into art, religion and other areas of science not directly involved with disease, but he never buries the reader in scientific jargon. I particularly enjoyed Zinsser’s critical takes on T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Gertrude Stein’s so-called “automatic writing”. Finally, someone who had the same reaction I had to those works.
One take-away was Zinsser’s observation that we have become short-sighted in our view of disease, thinking that knowledge of what has been learned in the few decades of our lives is sufficient to protect us going forward while all along we should be looking back several centuries to get a better picture what might/will cycle around as our future.
soylent soup for the soul 