The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

A] tour-de-force. --The New York Times

"The Fever is a vivid and compelling history with a message that's entirely relevant today." --Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

Renowned science journalist Sonia Shah explores the surprising history of a disease that has haunted humanity since long before the pandemics of our own time.

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause c l bre 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, at a time when the newly emergent COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the high cost of public health failures into stark relief, why aren't we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we've 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, prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer these questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its effect on human history. Over the centuries, she finds, we've placed our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, only to find them 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.

Combining lucid prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, utterly devastating history of one of humanity's most dogged foes--yielding essential lessons for our own time.

Author: Sonia Shah
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 06/21/2011
Pages: 309
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.66lbs
Size: 8.32h x 5.58w x 0.87d
ISBN: 9780312573010

About the Author
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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