"Like many people who have read this book about the Spanish Flu, I first learned about it due to COVID-19. I put it on my list and then, due to my peculiar reading habits, didn’t get to it until 4 and a half years later. Sometime early on in our pandemic, I started listening to Going Viral and so ended up learning about some of the stuff covered in this book. Fortunately it has been a few years and I’ve forgotten most of it.
Reading this book in 2024 is pretty eerie. So much of what is recounted here recurred in our pandemic in slightly different ways – as the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat it rhymes – and with way more technology and therefore way more awareness among the populace as to what was happening. But it’s still awfully strange to see how similarly people behave through time, even to someone like me who believes that people don’t really change, just circumstances.
Spinney does a mostly excellent job of telling the story. She looks at some specific regions and how they dealt with it. She deals with how they didn’t quite know what it was. (Wild that we had as much disagreement about COVID-related stuff now despite knowing vastly more information about the nature of it.) She deals with the fall out. She deals with how to prevent the next one, which seems quaint now but she couldn’t have known that within two-plus years of publication we’d be faced with a pandemic from a different virus.
For me the weakest part of the book is the attempt to show the Spanish Flu’s legacy in history and culture, or lack there for. Some of the mentions of cultural artifacts feel like a bit of a stretch, especially the works published notably later. (She notes one book published in the 1950s for example. I haven’t read it but 30 years feels like a long time.) But, funnily enough, one of the best parts of the book is her discussion of memory and how badly we’ve done remembering the Spanish Flu and why. These are ideas intertwined but for some reason, for me, when she is talking about art and culture, it felt like there wasn’t a lot there.
But when she is writing about how we collectively have trouble remembering pandemics immediately, especially one that happened at the end of a war, that was a lot more compelling. Ours is different, given the level of documentation and the people on social media still insisting that either we should all be staying home wearing masks or that the vaccines will somehow kill us all. (How’s that working out?) I do think most people seem inclined to forget it as much as they can, even with all the documentation, which is similar, it seems, to how people behaved 100 years ago. Maybe there will be way more art and history about our pandemic in 100 years too. (It’s really hard to imagine that, though…)
Anyway, even though it took me way too long to read it, I’m really glad I did. It’s a good history of a pivotal event and it obviously resonates a lot more if you’ve just been through something similar yourself. (This time with the help of the internet, streaming, food delivery and so many other conveniences nobody had 100 years ago.)"
Thanks for this comprehensive list, Riley. How did you like Pale Rider by the way?
"Like many people who have read this book about the Spanish Flu, I first learned about it due to COVID-19. I put it on my list and then, due to my peculiar reading habits, didn’t get to it until 4 and a half years later. Sometime early on in our pandemic, I started listening to Going Viral and so ended up learning about some of the stuff covered in this book. Fortunately it has been a few years and I’ve forgotten most of it.
Reading this book in 2024 is pretty eerie. So much of what is recounted here recurred in our pandemic in slightly different ways – as the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat it rhymes – and with way more technology and therefore way more awareness among the populace as to what was happening. But it’s still awfully strange to see how similarly people behave through time, even to someone like me who believes that people don’t really change, just circumstances.
Spinney does a mostly excellent job of telling the story. She looks at some specific regions and how they dealt with it. She deals with how they didn’t quite know what it was. (Wild that we had as much disagreement about COVID-related stuff now despite knowing vastly more information about the nature of it.) She deals with the fall out. She deals with how to prevent the next one, which seems quaint now but she couldn’t have known that within two-plus years of publication we’d be faced with a pandemic from a different virus.
For me the weakest part of the book is the attempt to show the Spanish Flu’s legacy in history and culture, or lack there for. Some of the mentions of cultural artifacts feel like a bit of a stretch, especially the works published notably later. (She notes one book published in the 1950s for example. I haven’t read it but 30 years feels like a long time.) But, funnily enough, one of the best parts of the book is her discussion of memory and how badly we’ve done remembering the Spanish Flu and why. These are ideas intertwined but for some reason, for me, when she is talking about art and culture, it felt like there wasn’t a lot there.
But when she is writing about how we collectively have trouble remembering pandemics immediately, especially one that happened at the end of a war, that was a lot more compelling. Ours is different, given the level of documentation and the people on social media still insisting that either we should all be staying home wearing masks or that the vaccines will somehow kill us all. (How’s that working out?) I do think most people seem inclined to forget it as much as they can, even with all the documentation, which is similar, it seems, to how people behaved 100 years ago. Maybe there will be way more art and history about our pandemic in 100 years too. (It’s really hard to imagine that, though…)
Anyway, even though it took me way too long to read it, I’m really glad I did. It’s a good history of a pivotal event and it obviously resonates a lot more if you’ve just been through something similar yourself. (This time with the help of the internet, streaming, food delivery and so many other conveniences nobody had 100 years ago.)"