The Fever

Sonia Shah is a prize-winning author and science journalist. Her articles on science, politics, and human rights have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and other publications. Her work has been featured on Fresh Air, RadioLab, and TED, where her talk, "Three Reasons We Still Don't Have Malaria," has been viewed by over 1,000,000 people worldwide.

Her 2010 book, The Fever, was described as a "tour-de-force history of malaria" by the New York Times, "rollicking" by Time, and "brilliant" by the Wall Street Journal, and was long-listed for the Royal Society's Winton Prize, the world's most prestigious prize for science writing. It is regarded as one of the best books on infectious disease.

Malaria has recently emerged as a cause celebre for fashionable philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are just a few of the celebrities who have lent their names—and opened their wallets—in the hopes of putting an end to the disease. Still, in an era when every new disease causes panic, why aren't we doing more to combat one of our oldest foes? And how does a pathogen that we've known how to prevent for over a century continue to infect 500 million people each year, killing nearly one million?

Sonia Shah, a journalist, sets out to answer those questions in The Fever, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its impact on human lives. She discovers that over the centuries, we've placed our hopes in a variety of drugs and technologies, only to have those hopes dashed. From the settlement of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wartimes and the advances of the Industrial Revolution, Shah follows malaria's erratic rise and the tragedies that followed, revealing a parasite as persistent as the insects that carry it. The Fever captures the strangely fascinating, devastating history of this long-standing thorn in humanity's side with distinguished prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere.

Author: Sonia Shah

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Fever-Malaria-Ruled-Humankind-Years/dp/0312573014/

Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars (from 72 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #229,168 in Books

#132 in Viral Diseases (Books)

#160 in Communicable Diseases (Books)

#265 in History of Medicine (Books)