I read books

It's been a while since I rapped at ya, as one of my favorite Onion columnists likes to say. And so it has, but that doesn't mean I've stopped reading books. I'll try to catch up on my lame opining soon. Today I offer I few sentences on The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.

This is one of the best books I've read this year. It is light reading, but not to be taken lightly. It is multi-disciplinary, but doesn't lack focus. Johnson knows both how to turn a pretty phrase and how to compile his considerable knowledge of history, biology, and psychology in a readable and addicting way. The Ghost Map is non-fiction, but could easily have been a novel instead, given the interesting characters and structure of events.

The book chronicles an outbreak of cholera in London in 1854 (I think I correctly remember the year) which was particularly virulent. An entire neighborhood was afflicted in the course of a matter of days with no one really having a clear idea how cholera traveled, or how to combat the disease. Johnson covers the epidemic from the microbial level, as he tracks with astonishing cunning the course of the disease virtually from person to person; on the human level, as he pictures entire families suffering together in their homes, soon to become their final resting place; and the city-wide level, as he sees London as an organic whole. At the time of the outbreak, London was a city of two million, an unheard of number of people living together. At the time, individuals did not really have the tools or capacity to see themselves from a bird's eye view. Johnson follows closely two individuals: one a preeminent doctor trying to get the establishment to accept his view that cholera was a water-borne disease, and another a clergyman, who was close enough to the population to have unique insight into how the neighborhood operated.

Additionally, in the first half of the book, on almost every page there is some remarkable bit of knowledge about societies. Did you know that at one prior to the domestication of animals, the lactose intolerance was the default position for humans? I didn't. Or that those that can hold their alcohol have been naturally selected over time, due to the virtues of alcohol as an antibacterial agent? I was deeply intrigued by this stuff.

The second half of the book hits many of the same points as the first, making for some duplicative chapters, but I'm not going to hold that against Johnson. In the last chapter, he tries to make the leap from the London cholera outbreak of 1854 to such diverse topics as how the internet is changing society, and why we might have less to fear from terrorists releasing a biological agent into the population that we might now imagine. I'm not sure how right all his conclusions are, but I admire his willingness to try to apply the lessons of the past to a modern environment. The book is now out in paperback, and once you start it, it will be finished in a matter of days, if not hours.