The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

The Great Influenza : The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

It was the first great collision between a natural force and modern science that included individuals who refused either to submit to that force or to simply call upon divine intervention to save themselves from it , individuals who instead were determined to confront this force directly , with a developing technology and with their minds

-John Barry (2005

The Great Influenza : The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

The Great Influenza : The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History is

a book written by John Barry . The author is a well know historian who wrote other several books such as the award-winning Rising Tide : The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 ' and another book titled How It Changed America . Most critics have stated that his current book has truly captured the essence of the disease that almost killed the citizens of America . Barry (2005 ) had skillfully written the story in a panoramic style , giving his readers a visual imagination of the situation . The book had been quoted by many intellectuals and academics and received positive reviews showing their praise for the book

Yet the story of the 1918 influenza virus is not simply one of havoc death , and desolation , of a society fighting a war against nature superimposed on a war against another human society (Barry , 2005 Prologue

It is also a story of science , of discovery , of how one thinks , and of how one changes the way one thinks , of how amidst near-utter chaos a few men sought the coolness of contemplation , the utter calm that precedes not philosophizing but grim , determined action (Barry , 2005 , Prologue

The book The Great Influenza : The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History ' revolves around the story of the disease that was assumed to have first affected the sick farm animals which then affected the military forces in Kansas . The disease spread and mutated due to the soldiers who traveled in Europe . It spread transversely to the world with an unusual pace and intensity that it killed many people in twenty weeks , which is more than the death produced by AIDS in twenty years The victims of this disease experienced bleeding of ears and nose . They turned blue due to the lack of enough oxygen going into the lungs . Each of the victims suffered aching of bones as if each of those bones were being wrecked (Barry , 2005

In the United States , dead bodies were sacked and placed into piles on trucks . The number of the dead people was seven times more than the first attack in the First World War . The epidemic spread like wild fire causing many people to panic and some were left helpless . There were uncontrollable deaths and devastated families were abandoned because of the death of their loved ones

The book recalls the haunting period of history through his intelligently clustered collection of correspondences , actions , stories and pieces of writing from the past and the present that evidently...