Christian W. McMillen's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Christian W. McMillen recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Christian W. McMillen's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

In the early fall of 1897, yellow fever shuttered businesses, paralyzed trade, and caused tens of thousand of people living in the southern United States to abandon their homes and flee for their lives. Originating in Cuba, the deadly plague inspired disease-control measures that not only protected U.S. trade interests but also justified the political and economic domination of the island nation from which the pestilence came. By focusing on yellow fever, Epidemic Invasions uncovers for the first time how the devastating power of this virus profoundly shaped the...

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Recommended by Christian W. McMillen, and 1 others.

Christian W. McMillenA great little book. One students love when I use it in class and students are always a good barometer for whether a book is palatable. This one is almost a diplomatic history through the lens of disease. (Source)

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2
Malaria sickens hundreds of millions of people—and kills one to three million—each year. Despite massive efforts to eradicate the disease, it remains a major public health problem in poorer tropical regions. But malaria has not always been concentrated in tropical areas. How did other regions control malaria and why does the disease still flourish in some parts of the globe?

From Russia to Bengal to Palm Beach, Randall Packard’s far-ranging narrative traces the natural and social forces that help malaria spread and make it deadly. He finds that war, land development, crumbling...
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Recommended by Bill Gates, Christian W. McMillen, and 2 others.

Bill Gates[On Bill Gates's reading list in 2011.] (Source)

Christian W. McMillenThis book is far and away the best introduction for anybody seeking to understand malaria’s importance in world history. (Source)

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3
This new edition of Clearing the Plains has a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Elizabeth A. Fenn, and explanations of the book's influence by leading Canadian historians. Called "one of the most important books of the twenty-first century" by the Literary Review of Canada, it was named a "Book of the Year" by The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, the Writers' Trust, and won the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, among many others less
Recommended by Christian W. McMillen, and 1 others.

Christian W. McMillenThe book shows how early capitalist trade and then sequestration on reservations, led to horrific mortality among native populations, due to infectious diseases that came over with European traders and colonizers. (Source)

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4
By the late fall of 1630, the Black Plague had descended upon northern Italy. The prentice Magistry of Public Health, centered in Florence, took steps to contain and combat the scourge. In this essay, Carlo Cipolla recreates the daily struggle of plague-stricken Monte Lupo, a rustic Tuscan village, revealing in the vivid terms of actual events and personalities a central drama of Western civilization - the conflict between faith and reason, Church and state. less
Recommended by Christian W. McMillen, and 1 others.

Christian W. McMillenCippolla uses court records and other kinds of primary evidence to explore what happened when the plague arrived as science started to challenge the way religion traditionally shaped people’s belief. He does it in about 80 pages of marvellous micro-history. (Source)

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5
Between the years 1918 and1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least fifty million people, more than half a million of them Americans. Yet despite the devastation, this catastrophic event seems but a forgotten moment in our nation's past.

American Pandemic offers a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak. It sheds light on the social and cultural history of Americans during the pandemic, uncovering both the causes of the nation's public amnesia and the depth of the quiet remembering that...
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Alex Chase-LevensonBristow considers the pandemic from a variety of angles, thinking about how life changed in ways that varied based on class, gender, profession, race, and locality, thinking about what kinds of events were cancelled, what sorts of disagreements doctors had, and how doctors and nurses diverged in their reactions, how cities grappled with various practical problems….What also makes Bristow’s work... (Source)

Christian W. McMillenA fascinating book about a pandemic that, about a hundred years ago, was estimated to have caused perhaps as many 100 million deaths worldwide, with almost 700,000 deaths in the U.S………The most interesting part of Bristow’s book is that she so clearly shows the ways in which both the medical profession and municipal officials had no idea what they were dealing with. Something like this hadn’t... (Source)

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