Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations
Simon Schama
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations
Simon Schama
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Eloquent, discursive.
The appearance of yet another enthusiastic and erudite history from Simon Schama is an event always to be welcomed.
The author, a wide-ranging historian and an engaging television host, reconciles the weight of medical detail with the light-footed pleasures of narrative discovery. His book profiles some of the unsung miracle workers of modern vaccination, and offers a subtle rumination on borders political and biological..
Simon Schama’s Foreign Bodies,...subtitle seems to promise a distinguished historian’s sweeping, century-spanning dissection of pandemics, vaccines, and public health. That turns out to be misdirection. Schama is a prodigious researcher and an often eloquent stylist. But readers interested in the sociology or epidemiology of plagues, or the science of vaccines, should look elsewhere.
Schama pulls delightfully diverse strands...and ties them into a neat bow.
A sweeping account.
Schama...is not the obvious or best qualified person to tell these stories. Nonetheless, he has done a superb job of distilling the secondary literature.
...extraordinary.
This important and inimitable book is sometimes gloomy and tragic, always cautionary and sage..
Foreign Bodies isn’t about the recent pandemic, but the reader soon realizes that once covid ambushed the world in 2020, Fauci, Paul, and others were fated to reprise roles written long ago and acted many times.
[An] epic and impassioned history.
[A] splendid and often moving work of history.
[A] fascinating story of vaccines’ spread.
Insightful.
This is a broad canvas, but Schama, a diligent and experienced historian, keeps the narrative on track, and he has a good eye for illustrative anecdotes. It adds up to a strong story that, in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, speaks to us all. A vivid account of the horror of epidemics and the breakthroughs that can bring them under control..