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The Fever

How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

Sonia Shah

Picador

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ISBN10: 0312573014
ISBN13: 9780312573010

Trade Paperback

320 Pages

$20.00

CA$27.00

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Longlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books

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 names—and opened their pocketbooks—in hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why are we not doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we have known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly one 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 have 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 devastating history of this long-standing thorn in the side of humanity.

Reviews

Praise for The Fever

"Sonia Shah's tour-de-force history of malaria will convince you that the real sound track to our collective fate [is] the syncopated whine-slap, whine-slap of man and mosquito duking it out over the aeons."—The New York Times



"Brilliant."—The Wall Street Journal



"This insightful book explores the human struggle with malaria not just from a scientific angle, which is cogently detailed without being overwhelming. But also from sociological and anthropological perspectives . . . Shah is to be commended."—The Boston Globe



"An often rollicking read . . . Shah has put together an engrossing cast of doctors, malariologists, and historical figures."—Time
"The Fever is a vivid and compelling history with a message that's entirely relevant today."—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

"I didn't just read The Fever—I inhaled it. It's a fascinating book, elegantly written and superbly well researched: a poignant and important reminder of malaria's relentless human toll."—Nina Munk, author of Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner

"A thrilling detective story, spanning centuries, about our erratic pursuit of a villain still at large and still a threat to mankind. The Fever is rich in colorful detail and engagingly told. An astonishing array of characters has joined the fray, and you can only be amazed at the deviousness and skill of the archenemy."—Malcolm Molyneux, Professor, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

"Extremely well-researched, The Fever provides a highly gripping account of one of mankind's worst diseases. Highly recommended."—Bart Knols, malariologist and managing director, MalariaWorld.org

"This fascinating, mordant pop-sci account tells us why malaria is one of the world's greatest scourges, killing a million people every year and debilitating another 300 million, and why we have remained complacent about it. Journalist Shah (The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs in the World's Poorest Patients) shows how the Plasmodium parasite, entering through a mosquito's bite and feasting on human red blood cells, has altered human history by destroying armies, undermining empires, and driving changes in our very genome. We've learned to fight back with antimalarial drugs and insecticides, but malaria's adaptability and its buzzing vector, Shah notes, give it the upper hand. Shah provides an intricate and lucid rundown of the biology and ecology of malaria, but her most original insights concern the ways in which human society accommodates and abets the parasite. (The impoverished denizens of Africa's malaria belt, she observes, would sometimes rather use the pesticide-laced bed nets sent by Western aid groups to catch fish.) Shah's is an absorbing account of human ingenuity and progress, and of their heartbreaking limitations."—Publishers Weekly

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

The view through the mosquito net is blurry, but I can see the

thick skin of grime on the leading edge of each blade of the

ceiling fan as it slowly whirs around, keening alarmingly.

This is how it was every summer when I...

About the author

Sonia Shah

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 Editor's Choice. Her next book, The Great Migration, is forthcoming in June 2020.

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