Books

My book, The Fever, is not uncritical toward the role the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has played in shaping global priorities around malaria. They’re big, they’re aggressive, and as a private entity they’re fundamentally non-democratic. I have a problem with all that, and I’ve written about why in my book and in articles. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that Mr. Gates recommended my book in his blog GatesNotes, and also picked it as the first of just 4 “good disease books” he’s read in recent years. If you want to read just one book about malaria, The Fever is probably the best choice. Author Sonia Shah doesn’t overwhelm you with data and analytics, but she does cover the whole history of the disease, which—as the title suggests—goes back further than you might think. The book was published in 2010, so it’s not totally up to date (most notably, we’ve made progress with rolling out bed nets since then). But it’s a great overview of malaria, its impact, and the solutions to it. -Bill Gates “The Fever” is in extremely good company on Gates’ list. The other 3 “good disease books” are by Bill Foege and D.A. Henderson, leaders of the smallpox eradication campaign, and one of my favorite authors, the physician-anthropologist and founder of Partners in Health Paul Farmer. http://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/4-Good-Disease-Books

So honored and flattered to find out that “The Fever” is one of 13 science books long-listed for the Royal Society Winton prize, considered the Booker Prize of science writing. The short-list of 6 will be announced in September, and the winner in November. Fingers crossed!

AIDS journalist Helen Epstein takes on malaria politics in this month’s Harper‘s magazine, in a long and thoughtful review essay on The Fever. It’s enough to make a gal re-subscribe (which I just did!)

Controlling malaria–as opposed to eradicating it, as today’s enthusiasts urge–may be a safer, more sustainable and socially valuable goal, I argue in this op-ed, which appears in today’s New York Times online (and also in the International Herald Tribune). Read it here.

I gave a talk at the wonderful independent bookstore Politics & Prose in Washington, DC last night, to a packed house. It was a great audience which included at least a few malariologists and malaria historians, not to mention a bunch of people who’d survived the disease and were active in the fight against it. I would have loved to have been able to answer more questions–my favorite was one guy who asked me whether I believed in the transmigration of souls (because I had talked about how the malaria parasite is such a shape-shifter). I think he may have been accusing me of being a mosquito in a past life! C-SPAN was there filming the event, so I should be able to post video soon.

Yesterday I taped an interview with Terry Gross for the NPR show “Fresh Air.” I’m a big fan of Terry’s and it was lovely to speak to her. We talked about the wily parasite Plasmodium, my own love/hate/guilt relationship with mosquitoes and malaria, malaria during WWI and WWII, and how mosquitoes are the original vampires. The interview is expected to broadcast sometime the week of July 19 or thereabouts. Also, this Saturday, look out for my essay on “The Abracadabra Cure”–my term for anti-malaria quick-fixes, coined for the second-century Roman anti-malarial incantation (yes, it was “Abracadabra”)–in the Wall Street Journal.