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The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years |  | Author: Sonia Shah
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
List Price: $26.00
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Seller: bloomsdaybooks & Records
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 9003
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 10 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0374230013
Dewey Decimal Number: 614.532
EAN: 9780374230012
ASIN: 0374230013
Publication Date: July 6, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their namesâand opened their pocketbooksâin hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why arenât we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that weâve 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, weâve 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 malariaâs 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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 Boring treatment of interesting subject September 1, 2010
Milkfan (Hinsdale, IL)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I think this book would have benefitted tremendously from better editing. It was way too wordy and repetitive. Instead of telling a story in a straight-forward and concise way, this book rambled around its points and had no discernible narrative structure. The subject is fascinating, but the book is dull.
Hold that metaphor, or: how to spoil a perfect subject September 1, 2010
Aldo Matteucci (hikurangi)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
"Vivid" and "compelling" gushes E. Kolbert on the back jacket; "Fascinating... elegant... superbly well researched...poignant and important" intones N. Munk; "extremely well researched... gripping. Highly recommended" concludes malariologist B. Knols. With such lavish praise, this is a book to read: malaria after all IS a thoroughly fascinating subject.
Well, to me all adjectives sound in a way true, but as ironic commentary to a poorly written book. It's a shame, for Ms Shah's personality, as it shimmers through the text, is engaging. She is enthusiastic about her subject, and had certainly gone to great lengths to read up the material - alas, she appears overwhelmed by the task of synthesis, and she has been given thoroughly bad advice about how to approach her readership.
Not trusting readers with complex matters Ms Shah foregoes a proper description of the parasites and their life cycle. Visual aids are eschewed. The spread of P. vivax and P. falciparum across the world has had a major impact on history - yet no map facilitates our understanding on the main thrusts. Readers are easily bored, she surmises, so words are qualified for effect: huts are dank, highlands are rugged, dreams are sad, ships are fine, particularly when it is a "flotilla of ships" (pg. 51) and natives... must be "local natives" (pg. 50). Anthropomorphic images are plentiful: "... malarial parasites munching on the hemoglobin" (pg. 44); parasites "rely on strategies..." (pg. 28); "malaria parasites teem with purpose inside the veins of the house sparrows" (pg. 19). Hyperbole is a stock of trade: "Once, the powerful men in the House of Parliament quaked in their boots at the thought of the mosquito's wrath" (pg. 172). And of course: "...desirable natural resources rest under prime malaria stomping grounds" (pg. 79). Alliterations abound: my favourite is "malarious masses". When all else fails, familiarity will do: " ...the parasite shtick fails..." (pg. 15), and the Atlantic Ocean is fondly called "the pond" (pg. 177). Ms Shah seems to fear the reader's short attention span, so she shorts the presentation for the telling anecdote, and gives inordinate amount of space e.g. to her visit to Blantyre and the fate of baby Duke.
One would like to sit down with her and go through the text, pointing out some howlers: "As human populations and the Plasmodium parasite in their veins collided during the age of exploration and conquest, malaria's differential killing power shuddered through the continents, altering the fate of nations." (pg. 37) or "In the closing months of the war, and overland evacuation route safe from German U-boats finally opened up" (pg. 79). And yes, she does have a thing about war at a distance: " Fifth-century Romans had to survive on shipments of food from North Africa, a thin thread that northern armies severed simply by holding up the grain ships at sea, plunging Rome into famine." (pg. 67). And the closing clause of Chapter 5: "Malarious embers smoulder on, awaiting their next spark." (pg. 120).
Hyperbole and mono-causality begins with the title: malaria has "ruled" humankind for 500'000 years. Well, Ms Shah asserts this on pg. 12 - no evidence given: just a "probable encounter at the time humankind discovered fire" - but her story really begins with Ice Age Africa, which is but a few thousand years ago. Republican (?) Rome's ascendancy was protected P. vivax, and felled by P. falciparum (pg. 63), and, yes, on pg. 58 she hints that malaria was destiny for the differential economic development of North and South in the US. She is probably right that malaria, like many other diseases, helped shape human history (see J. Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - who did probably did not pay enough attention to malaria) - it is sad that she limits herself to sweeping innuendo, rather than going through the difficult task of summarising the scattered scientific and historical evidence so that the lay but literate reader is enlightened.
More annoying is her disorderly use of timelines: Ms Shah flips back and forth repeatedly through time. So at pg. 176 she quotes a 1929 UN report on malaria in India, followed, in the next sentence, by a quote from Florence Nightingale, who had never been to India, but written about the country'a rural health in 1890. This divergence matters, for knowledge about malaria increased immensely during that period. In discussing the IDAT program of the late `50s Ms Shah quotes in the same sentence Buddhist monks and Gandhi, who had died decades earlier (pg. 209). Ms Shah's poor control of numbers is exemplified by her tale of Darién, where the long-suffering Scots seem to multiply in order better to fall ill by the hundreds, die by the dozen, and abandon the place repeatedly. But of course - they could have captured "...dozens of turtles - enough to feed more than a thousand men" (a miracle of Christian proportions) - pg. 52. According to her quote, in Zambia two years of IMF prescribed restructuring programs caused "life expectancy to drop from fifty-four to forty years." (pg. 221). Wow, not even a war can do that!
Ms Shah is clearly bewildered by her subject. She is certainly right to show "the folly of treating malaria as a single disease with a single solution" (pg. 218). She spends 120 pages of her book proving that with examples from the past, replete with righteous finger wagging at the characters involved. Less than half would have sufficed: the subject is malaria, not human folly. As for the future, she seems to be despondent - the recent "top down" initiatives in her view equally misguided as all those of the past (I could agree with that).
Ms Shah frets: a new species of Plasmodium is adapting to the human host (P. knowlesi), and malaria could strike Europe again if "a blackout stalls the water pumps" (pg. 241), presumably flooding the Pontine Plains and other drained marshes. This, I'm afraid is plain nonsense. Yes, we'll have the occasional outbreak of malaria in developed countries, and treatment will promptly stomp it out. Malaria is unlikely to become endemic again. For malaria is a disease of poverty - as Jeffrey Sachs argues. There is a strong negative correlation between malaria and income: one speaks of the $ 4000 line, above which malaria seems to fade out (expect geographical, and cultural variations around this rule of thumb). This is no different from other tropical diseases, like sleeping sickness, which have receded in the face of the environmental transformation that mankind has wrought.
"The uncomfortable truth is that ending malaria over the long term will require much more difficult social and economic adjustments in African communities, just as it has elsewhere." (pg. 237) wails Ms Shah. "Uncomfortable?" here we have the likely (and desirable) outcome - and Ms Shah calls it "uncomfortable"! She fails to grasp the experience of Europe and North America in respect of malaria, as well as many other rapidly advancing countries. Difficult? Well we did it as we developed, did we not? G. Harding despaired of population control in 1968. Two generations of educated women later - the "difficult social and economic adjustments" needed to edge the world toward population stability have been accomplished - and yes, without agreeing on a target level beforehand, and at mighty little cost.
Malaria is firstly a matter of intelligent adaptation to the vector and the parasites. This process can be helped along by conscious efforts to understand the process, primarily at the local level. No silver bullets, no patent recipes, but simple programmes aiming to transfer experience can certainly help. Local knowledge and empowerment is the key, not cats or wisdom parachuted from on high. And if we keep on this adaptive process, well wake up one day and the problem has receded. After all: the US are the breadbasket of the world. By planning and silver bullets? No, the USDA extension service did it, one rural community at the time. "Malaria extension officers" might be what we need first and foremost.
 A Greek Tragedy Featuring Bloodsucking/Parasites Played On a Global Stage August 25, 2010
R. A. Barricklow (Las Vegas NV USA)
The tragedy is of course the millions of children that have fallen prey to this deadly parasite. A tragedy that has played out across the globe and has been on the stage with mankind since he/she emerged as homo sapiens. A tragedy, in that half of all human deaths since the stone age have been attributed to malaria.
The author wisely makes the connection between what the ancient Greeks called, "Knowing that"(theoretical knowledge) & "Knowing how"(practical knowlege), which she then passes onto the reader.
When you have turned the last page you will find there is another kind of bloodsucker/parasite present in the form of the globalized, privitized, for-profit blood money genus.
The author does not quantify them as the major obstacle in the continuous battle over this amazing "shape shifter" of a parasite. Indeed, she identifies this major hurtle as "a cultural challenge". It is the endemic poor, across the globe that provide the blood reservoir for the parasite. It will therefore, because of the cultural aspects, take a grass-roots-up approach to have the desired effects. Thus, to both eradicate the poverty & malaria, in a one/two simultaneous knock-out punch, it will take a public/health & public/finance dance with deadly malaria/privitized central bank. The bank can be done with simply forming a public bank within the community(read: Web of Debt by Ellen Brown on how it's done). The infrastructure should then be based upon medical: structures, personal, supplies, roads, etc. This then, with the locally-owned community bank(intially infused with donations with the goal of self perpetuating/exponential growth) would breath local currency into the community bank(with exchange capabilities), AND then breath it BACK INTO THE COMMUNITY, ever breathing in & out capital while sustaining growth locally. Eventually, through the sands of time, the bloodsucker/parasites would be colored gone.
In the expansion's wake would be the ghosts of the shapeshifters & the moneylenders. In their stead, would be many, many children at play in a land, now full of promise & future - for theirs & their children to come.
For me, probably the most fascinating part was about the very beginnings of the parasite. Plasmodium did not start out a killer hardwired to steal. It's ancestor contains vestiges of the machinery of photosynthesis! We know this from it's DNA which still retains approximately 10 percent of these proteins.
Extrememly entertaining in the history that encompasses both mankind & the parasite. It has shaped our settlement patterns & our histories. One in 14 people alive today have the genetic mutations in their bodies do to malaria. 300 million people will get it this year & of those, one million will die. The tragedy is that close to most will be babies & children.
Even now, the parasite is developing new hosts and finding new vectors into human beings. It is increasing its multi-drug resistences. It is evolving faster than we can manafacture or genetically engineer stop gaps.
Recently, a naturally occurring virus may serve as a "late-life-acting" insecticide by killing older adult mosquitoes for the bulk of malarias transmission. The reseachers from John Hopkins detail their research in the August 2010 issue of the Journal of Virology.
HIGHLY RECOMMENED !!!!!!!
good book, but August 22, 2010
M. F. H. (Strabane,Pa)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book was an interesting read on malaria. More people from the United States need to read this book for a better understanding of what might come to this country again.
the only problem was the price, unfortunatly i was taken by the sample and deceided to buy it,going against my held don;t buy anything over 9.99.. After I finished I wished that I had waited until the price would come down, way to much money for the book,especially since I had so many bookmarks, I would have prefer to have the book in hand to refer to.
History of Malaria August 14, 2010
Jerald A. Burton MD
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Excellent in every way. Amazing use of historical resources to write such a book.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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