The Fever by Sonia Shah

The Fever by Sonia Shah

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause celebre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names and opened their pocketbooks in hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren t we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we ve known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly 1 million of them?

In The Fever, the journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer these questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives. Through the centuries, she finds, we ve invested our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, and invariably those hopes have been dashed. From the settling of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wars and the advances of the Industrial Revolution, Shah tracks malaria s jagged ascent and the tragedies in its wake, revealing a parasite every bit as persistent as the insects that carry it. With distinguished prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, devastating history of this long-standing thorn in the side of humanity.

Shah, Sonia: - Sonia Shah is a science journalist and prizewinning author. Her writing on science, politics, and human rights has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and elsewhere, and she has been featured on Radiolab, Fresh Air, and TED.com, where her talk Three Reasons We Still Haven't Gotten Rid of Malaria has been viewed by more than a million people around the world. Her book The Fever was long-listed for the Royal Society's Winton Prize for Science Books, and Pandemic was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374230012
ISBN 10	0374230013
Title	The Fever
Author	Sonia Shah
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Sarah Crichton Books
Year published	2010-07-22
Number of pages	307
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.