Books making a COVID-19 comeback

The words pandemic, lockdown, and quarantine have become an integral part of our vocabulary, thanks to the coronavirus.

KOCHI: The words pandemic, lockdown, and quarantine have become an integral part of our vocabulary, thanks to the coronavirus. ‘Quarantine’ was derived from the Italian quaranta giorni, which means 40 days. In the 14th century, in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics, ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing.  

Tons of books and movies will no doubt be made about this period of our lives. Meanwhile, many forgotten books are now making a comeback. Sylvia Browne’s 2008 book End Of Days suddenly went viral, as she seemed to accurately predict COVID-19. She writes: “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”

However, the rest of the book has predictions where she got almost everything wrong. Lockdown by Scottish author Peter May, which was rejected by publishers in 2005 for being “extremely unrealistic and unreasonable”, was finally published in 2020. The thriller is set in London, the epicentre of a global pandemic that forces officials to institute a lockdown. May used British and US pandemic preparedness documents from 2002.

We’ve seen a resurgence of bestselling suspense writer Dean Koontz’s 1981 novel, The Eyes of Darkness, and this excerpt indicates why: “… a Chinese scientist named Li Chen moved to the United States while carrying a floppy disk of data from China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon of the past decade. They call it Wuhan-400 because it was developed in their RDNA laboratory just outside the city of Wuhan.” The Ostrich Paradox by Wharton professors Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther is a must-read for private and public leaders, planners and policymakers who want to build more prepared communities. 

With talk of reusing the polio vaccine for Covid-19 treatment, interest in its history has suddenly surged. I attended a book event at Stanford University about the legendary and controversial Jonas Salk, the man behind the polio vaccine. His biography Jonas Salk: A Life by Charlotte DeCross Jacobs is a complete portrait of an enigmatic, anguished idealist, one of the greatest and least understood figures of the 20th century. Few know about Salk’s part in developing the influenza vaccine, and his pioneering work in AIDS.

Sometimes Brilliant by Larry Brilliant, a scientist who had worked on eradicating smallpox while at the WHO, is about his adventures as a philosopher, mystic, hippie, doctor, groundbreaking tech innovator, and key player in smallpox eradication. His story of what happens when love, compassion and determination meet the right circumstances to effect positive change, is the kind that keeps hope alive in these trying times.

My favourite, best researched, and most relevant book is The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, which is back in the New York Times bestseller list after a decade. The book offers a timely tale of triumph and tragedy as we face a similar challenge after 100 years!   (The author is technologist based in Silicon Valley, who is gently mad about books)

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