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 EpiMonitor
Summer Book Roundup

 

Author: Madeline Roberts, PhD, MPH

The final weeks of summer often bring the ambivalence of looking for a respite from the heat while also wanting to cling to the last bit of the season. Whether you find yourself at the beach, poolside, or simply with a bit of extra time on your hands, you may want a book on hand. We’ve rounded up a few that we’ve been thinking about, and we hope they spark your interest and thinking.


Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund

 In the age of disinformation and misinformation, we’re revisiting a 2018 Hans Rosling book for a refresher on the “the stress-reducing habit of carrying only the opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.” Published posthumously with his daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund and son Ola Rosling, the authors describe this book as “data as therapy.”

 The book is organized into ten human instincts which tend to distort our perceptions of the world. Each chapter concludes with a succinct description that brings “factfulness” to bear on the erroneous instinct. For example, the size instinct makes numbers in isolation impressive; “to control the size instinct, get things in proportion.”

 Rosling writes, “I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful."

Also, watch Hans Rosling encourage his audience to “think beyond the obvious” as he swallows a Swedish army bayonet near the end of his TED talk “New Insights on Poverty” (around minute 17:20).
 

 


The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World
by Steven Johnson

If you’re an epidemiology enthusiast or want to renew your active appreciation for the marvel that is sanitation infrastructure, this is your book. Regarded as the father of modern epidemiology, one of the original geospatial analysts, and the exemplar of Intro Epidemiology classes, John Snow is the original epidemiology icon. The Ghost Map brings his story alive in technicolor within the context of the 1854 London cholera outbreak. Author Steven Johnson humanizes a historic outbreak and weaves together Victorian newspaper and magazine reports, disease transmission theories old and new, and vivid literary descriptions of what the streets of London were like in the Victorian era from Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew.

Johnson added an afterword in 2023 reflecting on COVID in view of the 1854 cholera epidemic. He underscores that even in the face of COVID denialism, the evidence indicates that we are learning from this epidemic, citing mRNA vaccines and the controversial lockdowns.

Considering the entire history of disease and human response, he offers an interesting perspective: “The period from March 2020 to May 2020 almost certainly marked the most significant short-term change ever in worldwide human behavior. Vast sections of the planet effectively froze in place…and then adopted a whole new set of routines to flatten the curve and slow the spread—a genuinely new trick for Homo sapiens. It was not obvious in advance that such a thing was even possible.”

This book also serves as a sobering reminder that an estimated 40% percent of the world still lacks sanitation facilities, which puts a considerable proportion of the global population at risk for myriad infectious diseases. Safely managed sanitation is one of the most basic and powerful interventions to advocate for and work toward.
 

 


The Obstacle is the Way
by Ryan Holiday

“The things which hurt, instruct.” Benjamin Franklin

“Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.” Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel

Although more of a business or personal development book, The Obstacle may also offer some perspective for the post-pandemic public health reorg in which we find ourselves. To navigate crises, Holiday outlines Stoic principles such as ruthlessly objective thinking and purposeful action as the path to resilience. He repeatedly reminds that it is possible for opportunity to present itself in the form of overwhelming obstacles.

There is likely some measure of selection bias in the presented case studies and historical anecdotes of successful people, and, at times, The Obstacle felt trite and in the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps genre. However, it also advocates for viewing problems and challenges as opportunities rather than threats. One of the primary benefits of remaining objective is that removing emotions and reputation from consideration allows a broader domain of solutions and actions to emerge by eliminating the need to save face.

Public health, both as an entity and as a collection of individual professionals, is recovering from an extraordinary ordeal. The Obstacle urges readers to “[understand] our problems for what’s within them and their greater context,” and to have “an eye for opportunity and pivotal moments.” And surely there has not been a more pivotal moment for public health in recent history.
 

 

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