Tag: non-fiction

Review – History in Flames

Posted November 3, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts

by Robert Bartlett

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 220
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
To what extent does our knowledge of the past rely upon written sources? And what happens when these sources are destroyed? Focusing on the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, History in Flames explores cases in which large volumes of written material were destroyed during a single day. This destruction didn't occur by accident of fire or flood but by human forces such as arson, shelling and bombing. This book examines the political and military events that preceded the moment of destruction, from the Franco-Prussian War and the Irish Civil War to the complexities of World War II; it analyses the material lost and how it came to be where it was. At the same time, it discusses the heroic efforts made by scholars and archivists to preserve these manuscripts, even partially. History in Flames reminds us that historical knowledge rests on material remains, and that these remains are vulnerable.

Robert Bartlett’s History in Flames is not that different to a bunch of other books I’ve read semi-recently that discuss the destruction of libraries and books, except that he also discusses more quotidian manuscripts as well — records of gifts and debts, government records, etc. It’s a relatively slim volume, first defining the problem and what we know about manuscript losses, and then discussing some particular examples.

He does manage to avoid being judgemental of e.g. peasants destroying records of debts, mostly, but doesn’t really extend the same kind of understanding around the destruction of Irish records, which sometimes feels a little odd. Mostly, though, pretty interesting, and a couple of cases I didn’t know much or anything about, which made a bit of a change from the usual “libraries and war”, “book burnings”, etc, books.

It’s a pretty quick read, but conscientious about sourcing, which is nice to see as well. I long for numbered footnotes, but at least the end notes make clear not just the chapter but also the page they refer to.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Robert Bartlett

My Year in Non-fiction

Posted November 2, 2025 by Nicky in General / 1 Comment

Non-fiction November technically started on October 27th, and I’m just sliding in under the wire with my post for the first week!

So far this year I’ve read 87 non-fiction books (28% of my reads overall), according to StoryGraph, and one of my first reads of the year was non-fiction. I’ve turned to non-fiction increasingly as I got older, finding a lot of solace from anxiety in treating curiosity as its antidote — both curiosity about the things I’m frightened of, and curiosity in general.

With so many books read, I’m not going to discuss all 87, but I want to pick out some favourites if I can! It’s tough to split them into any kind of sections, because I read all sorts, but there are a few topics I turn to time and again. I’ll stick with books for which I’ve posted reviews already, though there are a handful of lovely choices in my review backlog as well.

Health and disease

I’m sorry, I know, it’s not very cheery! But my most recent degree was in infectious diseases, and the ins and outs of health and disease are both scary and fascinating.

Laura Dawes’ Fighting Fit covers the efforts to keep Britain healthy during WWII. The picture is surprisingly rosy, in part thanks to scientists and physicians who experimented (including on themselves) to try to figure out optimum diets, etc. John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis is less cheery, given the ongoing world threat of tuberculosis (largely suffered by those in poverty, which is why many believe TB is no longer a threat). It’s now my go-to recommendation for a pop-science read around one of the diseases I find most fascinating, and on which I wrote my undergraduate dissertation.

Monty Lyman’s The Immune Mind wasn’t a total win — I had a few reservations about a couple of elements — but it’s fascinating, and offers some surprising suggestions about treating mental health.

Finally, if you’re in possession of a female-shaped body, Sarah Graham’s Rebel Bodies may be of use to you, especially if you live in the UK. It discusses some of the medical bias and misconceptions about women’s bodies, in an inclusive way. At the very least, it’s validating.

Nature

This isn’t a topic I deliberately seek out, but there’s a lot of popular science out there about it, so it regularly crosses my bookshelves anyway!

First, a quick mention of Matt Sewell’s charming short collections about birds, suitable for children, but beautifully illustrated — I think I only reviewed Penguins and Other Sea Birds, as they’re each very similar. On a similar vein, but aimed more at adults, there’s Around the World in 80 Birds, illustrated by Ryuto Miyake.

On another tack, there’s Amorina Kingdon’s Sing Like Fish, which discusses sound underwater with a wealth of examples… and a bit more depressingly, Hugh Warwick’s Cull of the Wild: Killing in the Name of Conservation, which wrestles with some important questions.

Fashion history

I never expected to be into this, to be honest, but between Great British Sewing Bee and the memories of a childhood book where you had to collect little cards and stick them in to chart fashion through the ages, somehow it slipped in. And it often turns out to be much more than just the history of fashion, since fashion tells us a good deal about all kinds of trends, like women’s rights.

The whole “Fashion in Detail” series from the V&A is lovely, but Sau Fong Chan’s Chinese Dress in Detail is particularly well put together. The others are very enjoyable too, but Chinese Dress in Detail is the best organised.

General history

I know, this probably deserves to be broken down into categories like “ancient history” and so on, with many more books included, but I haven’t got the patience, ahaha. So here are some very brief history highlights; I’ve tried to pick out some of the less well-trodden titles I haven’t seen other bloggers talk about.

The Other Olympians is a fascinating dissection of sport and panic about gender, and the links between those “concerns” and fascism leading up to WWII (and not just in Germany, but also in the US in particular). As for David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu’s Who Owns This Sentence, I found it surprisingly lively for a book about copyright history, and enjoyed it a lot.

Paul Koudounaris’ Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs was an impulse pick because of the beautiful illustrations, and I couldn’t possibly regret it. It’s macabre, but fascinating and beautiful too.

Finally, Sara Lodge’s The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective upended some of my assumptions, discussing both fictional and historical sources to point out the role of women in detection was a lot broader than you might think.

Other

And so we come to some books I find harder to place, but which deserve their moment…

Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma came at a particularly important moment for me, given the accusations of Neil Gaiman. Over the years, I’d mostly got less interested in his work, but I loved Good Omens still (including the TV adaptation, though I consider the two quite different beasts, and I didn’t love season two). It offers no answers, and I have heavy caveats about the examples of female “monsters” Dederer includes — but it was useful in that particular moment to read about someone else wrestling with it.

Maud Rowell’s Blind Spot: Exploring and Educating on Blindness is part of the Inklings series of short non-fiction books, an excellent discovery of this year. It’s also on a topic near and dear to my heart, given my previous volunteering work and family connections. And finally Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement is something I think we could all use pondering on a bit more.

That’s been quite the whistle-stop tour, and I’ve inevitably missed out something I found amazing — but I hope it’s a good sampling of the riches I’ve found this year!

As for what I’d like to read more of… well, everything, whether it fits into my categories above or not. There’s so much to learn about, after all.

NB: sorry if this shows up in feeds/emails again. I accidentally unpublished it and had to republish.

Tags: books, non-fiction, Non-fiction November

Review – Bitch

Posted October 26, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal

by Lucy Cooke

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 400
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again.

In the last few decades a revolution has been brewing in zoology and evolutionary biology. Lucy Cooke introduces us to a riotous cast of animals, and the scientists studying them, that are redefining the female of the species.

Meet the female lemurs of Madagascar, our ancient primate cousins that dominate the males of their species physically and politically. Or female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii. Or the meerkat mothers of the Kalahari Desert – the most murderous mammals on the planet.

The bitches in Bitch overturn outdated binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour. Lucy Cooke's brilliant new book will change how you think – about sex, sexual identity and sexuality in animals and also the very forces that shape evolution.

Lucy Cooke’s Bitch aims to re-examine things that are taken for biological truths (like the idea that eggs are more costly so female animals evolved to be choosy while sperm is “cheap” and male animals are always profligate with it) in order to debunk the idea that female animals are less evolved than male animals.

She digs into this through a wide range of examples, but it’s worth noting that she really takes until the last chapter to wrestle with the fact that a male/female binary is an overly reductive and in fact unhelpful way of viewing the world. Each example, until the last chapter, is predicated on the idea that there are female animals and male animals, and some of those female animals are a bit more masculinised than we thought, or the sex roles are a bit more fluid or just plain different than we thought. It’s only in the last chapter that she reckons with species that have more than two recognised sexes (humans also have more than two phenotypic sexes, but because intersex individuals are comparatively rare and viewed as simply aberrant, we don’t really talk about that and this is never acknowledged) and the fact that the variation between sexes is actually often less than the variation between any given pair of individuals (including individuals considered to be of the same sex).

Which is to say, she doesn’t really properly reckon with it at all, since it comes in as an afterthought. As far as she goes, there are some interesting examples that overturn and complicate scientists’ expectations.

It might be a good one to sneak in some more complicated biology on people who think that genes or hormones or genitalia are the be-all and end-all of sex, but have some space between their ears for new concepts.

Personally, I learned about some new-to-me examples, and learned about some scientists who are doing interesting work, but it wasn’t overall that surprising or new to me.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Lucy Cooke, non-fiction, science

Review – Valkyrie

Posted October 22, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World

by Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 280
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Valkyries: the female supernatural beings that choose who dies and who lives on the battlefield. They protect some, but guide spears, arrows and sword blades into the bodies of others. Viking myths about valkyries attempt to elevate the banality of war - to make the pain and suffering, the lost limbs and deformities, the piles of lifeless bodies of young men, glorious and worthwhile. Rather than their death being futile, it is their destiny and good fortune, determined by divine beings. The women in these stories take full part in the power struggles and upheavals in their communities, for better or worse.

Drawing on the latest historical and archaeological evidence, Valkyrie introduces readers to the dramatic and fascinating texts recorded in medieval Iceland, a culture able to imagine women in all kinds of roles carrying power, not just in this world, but pulling the strings in the other-world, too. In the process, this fascinating book uncovers the reality behind the myths and legends to reveal the dynamic, diverse lives of Viking women.

Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir’s Valkyrie attempts to give us a pretty comprehensive picture of the position of women in Norse society (I don’t say “Viking”, because “Vikings” are the ones who went out trading and plundering, and this is a more complete picture than that), using evidence from archaeology, from any written sources we have, and especially from the sagas.

It may sound weird to take evidence from sagas, but there are two reasons this is justified. First, as anyone who has studied the Icelandic sagas knows, they contain detail which has been verified. Oral histories passed down through generations have, in many different societies worldwide, proven astonishingly accurate in general, and archaeological evidence has verified things previously considered fanciful (like the fact that the Vikings made it to North America, now a matter of historical fact).

That said, such sources need handling with care, and the author does that pretty well, always explaining what seems a reasonable inference and what isn’t. She leans on the sagas a lot, though, and that can get pretty repetitive (especially if you’ve read them).

Overall, I found I didn’t learn a lot, but I did start with a fairly high degree of knowledge. I think it might be a bit dry for a lot of readers, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff discussed, albeit sometimes crushing to one’s hopes of bands of Viking warrior women.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, non-fiction

Review – The Hero

Posted October 21, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Hero

by Lee Child

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 96
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
In his first work of nonfiction, the creator of the multimillion-selling Jack Reacher series explores the endurance of heroes from Achilles to Bond, showing us how this age-old myth is a fundamental part of what makes us human. He demonstrates how hero stories continue to shape our world – arguing that we need them now more than ever.

From the Stone Age to the Greek Tragedies, from Shakespeare to Robin Hood, we have always had our heroes. The hero is at the centre of formative myths in every culture and persists to this day in world-conquering books, films and TV shows. But why do these characters continue to inspire us, and why are they so central to storytelling?

Scalpel-sharp on the roots of storytelling and enlightening on the history and science of myth, The Hero is essential reading for anyone trying to write or understand fiction. Child teaches us how these stories still shape our minds and behaviour in an increasingly confusing modern world, and with his trademark concision and wit, demonstrates that however civilised we get, we’ll always need heroes.

Lee Child’s The Hero is a bit of a ramble about language that works its way around to talking about what “hero” means, and how he thinks humans developed heroes. It’s a short read and it’s pretty slight, based on little evidence and without any sources — but if you’re interested in Child as a storyteller, it might be worthwhile to read and get an idea of how he sees storytelling and indeed heroes.

For me, I haven’t actually read any of Child’s work (and I’m not sure it’d be my thing if I did), but it was still mildly entertaining to follow someone else’s slightly rambling train of thought and imagination about how stories came to be, and why we need them.

Not something I’d super recommend, though.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Lee Child, non-fiction

Review – Between Two Rivers

Posted October 17, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Between Two Rivers

by Moudhy Al-Rashid

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 336
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time.

With startling modernity, the people of Mesopotamia left behind hundreds of thousands of fragments of their everyday lives. Immortalised in clay and stone are intimate details from 4000 years ago. We find accounts of an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, a dog's paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, a parent desperately trying to soothe a baby with a lullaby, the imprint of a child's teeth as it sank them into their clay homework, and countless receipts for beer.

In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid examines what these people chose to preserve in their own words about their lives, creating the first historical records and allowing us to brush hands with them thousands of years later.

Bringing us closer than ever before to the lives of ancient people, Between Two Rivers tells not just the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made.

Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers is a conversational, fairly personal introduction to some Mesopotamian history through things that she is interested in herself, which made it a nice companion for a quiet evening, while leaving a bit of an itch for more info in some cases. The chapters lead on nicely from each other, building up a picture of ancient life based on the finds in the palace of Ennigaldi-Nanna, a priestess and daughter of a Babylonian king.

In the process, while introducing the finds and contextualising them as best as possible, Al-Rashid digs into some of the assumptions that archaeologists make (does a label for an item make a museum? does the presence of learning materials make a school, or are there other explanations like reuse of waste?). Perhaps the thing that startled me the most was realising that we can actually follow some specific ancient people through scribal records by name, getting a fair outline of their lives.

What’s most obviously lacking, though, is any kind of photography or even sketches to show us what she’s describing. She does write pretty good descriptions that give me a fairly reasonable idea of what she’s discussing, though I have no “mind’s eye” and thus I’m not really able to “picture” them in the way most people can.

So, yeah, pretty conversational, sometimes a little rambling/repetitive, overall: I enjoyed her style and her choices of topics, and found it an overall very pleasant read, but it did make me want to return to Selena Wisnom’s The Library of Ancient Wisdom and spend more time with that in hopes of more detail.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Moudhy Al-Rashid, non-fiction

Review – The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker

Posted October 12, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker: The story of Britain through its census, since 1801

by Roger Hutchinson

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 352
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
At the beginning of each decade for 200 years the national census has presented a self-portrait of the British Isles. The census has surveyed Britain from the Napoleonic wars to the age of the internet, through the agricultural and industrial revolutions, possession of the biggest empire on earth and the devastation of the 20th century's two world wars.

In The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker, Roger Hutchinson looks at every census between the first in 1801 and the latest in 2011. He uses this much-loved resource of family historians to paint a vivid picture of a society experiencing unprecedented changes.

Hutchinson explores the controversial creation of the British census. He follows its development from a head-count of the population conducted by clerks with quill pens, to a computerised survey which is designed to discover 'the address, place of birth, religion, marital status, ability to speak English and self-perceived national identity of every twenty-seven-year-old Welsh-speaking Sikh metalworker living in Swansea'.

All human life is here, from prime ministers to peasants and paupers, from Irish rebels to English patriots, from the last native speakers of Cornish to the first professional footballers, from communities of prostitutes to individuals called 'abecedarians' who made a living from teaching the alphabet.

Roger Hutchinson’s The Butcher, The Baker, the Candlestick-Maker proves to be not just “the story of Britain through its census”, but also the story of the census itself, about which I knew comparatively little. It was fascinating to read about the development of the census, the difficulties with implementing it, and of course the findings.

Hutchinson chooses some examples at times to illustrate his point, though sometimes he must either be making it up or going far beyond the census data in his discussions of some people’s lives. I found it really fascinating to explore the impact of events like the Potato Famine, emigration to America, the Highland Clearances, and of course the World Wars: it’s pretty much what you’d expect, but the census data makes it starkly clear. Hutchinson also has an interest in the charting of the decline of the non-English British languages, which I enjoyed.

Overall, at times it feels a little bitty — and like so many of these books, I feel it’s a history rather than the history, and another story might be told from the same data. But I found it interesting, and a surprisingly compulsive read, though the bibliography is worryingly thin.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Roger Hutchinson

Review – A History of the World in 47 Borders

Posted October 5, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps

by Jonn Elledge

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 352
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does - and about the scale of human folly.

From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders.

Jonn Elledge’s A History of the World in 47 Borders is very breezy and flippant, and that’s both part of what makes it enjoyable and part of what makes it frustrating. It turns out that 47 (48 in the edition I have, actually, since an additional chapter on Poland is included) chapters leave not a lot of pages to cover each border, including some very complicated situations that have sparked wars and genocides. He sometimes makes light of the issues in a way that makes me uncomfortable, because they haven’t always been possible to reduce to a snarky footnote.

I did learn stuff from this book, and enjoy too in some ways, but… at the same time, it really is brief, and I don’t think I could explain most of it reasonably clearly to anyone else, it’s so simplified. The sources worry me, given that (for example) the sources on the Partition of India turn out to be chiefly two documentaries. Now, the documentaries do apparently include (alleged) first-hand accounts, but. Hm.

As a piece of popular history writing, I should possibly rate it higher — I did enjoy it and found it reasonably absorbing. But doubts grew as I read, and, well, here I am.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Jonn Elledge, non-fiction

Review – Queer as Folklore

Posted September 30, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Queer as Folklore

by Sacha Coward

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 346
Rating:

Synopsis:
Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents to reveal the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new.

Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul's Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the 'queerly departed' along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows, found kinship in the in-between and created safe spaces in underworlds; but these forgotten narratives tell stories of remarkable resilience that deserve to be heard.

Join any Pride march and you are likely to see a glorious display of papier-mâché unicorn heads trailing sequins, drag queens wearing mermaid tails and more fairy wings than you can shake a trident at. But these are not just accessories: they are queer symbols with historic roots.

To truly understand who queer people are today, we must confront the twisted tales of the past and Queer as Folklore is a celebration of queer history like you've never seen it before.

I ended up finishing Sacha Coward’s Queer as Folklore quickly by skimming it, which is disappointing, but there were a number of red flags about his methodology/ability to back up his claims. For example, he gives us some quotations from a really crusty old translation of the Poetic Edda (from 1936):

Then loud spoke Thrym, the giants’ leader:
‘Who ever saw bride more keenly bite?
I ne’er saw bride with a broader bite,
Nor a maiden who drank more mead than this!’

Thrym looked ‘neath the veil, for he longed to kiss,
But back he leaped the length of the hall:
‘Why are so fearful the eyes of Freyja?
Fire, methinks, from her eyes burns forth.’

And then announces, with absolutely no further evidence:

It is this comedic sequence of questioning Thor’s appearance while in drag that seems to have inspired the most famous part of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Red Riding Hood famously says to the wolf, who is disguised as her grandmother, what big teeth she has, and what big eyes she has.

On what evidence, other than the questions being vaguely similar? Did Perrault know the Poetic Edda? Where is the evidence that these things have a direct connection? If it “seems to have inspired” ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, you’re going to need to provide some additional evidence backing that.

There are also some basic errors of fact, when he states that Carmilla (1872) was written before Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). He talks about Carmilla, then Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, and then immediately goes on to:

… both these depictions of female vampires predate Dracula, Nosferatu and even Polidori’s ‘Vampyre’ by a number of years.

No. No, not they don’t. ‘Christabel’ (1797) does predate Polidori (1819), but Carmilla (1872) does not. This is apparent through an extremely basic understanding of the flow of time: 1819 comes before 1872.

Either someone messed up his facts, or he failed to catch this glaring issue in any editing pass, and didn’t have an editor to notice it either. That’s… worrying.

There are some references and a bibliography, so it’s not as though this is so focused on a popular audience that it doesn’t seem necessary to provide citations and evidence to back up a claim, and even being focused on a popular audience wouldn’t excuse blatant errors.

Unfortunately, not one I can recommend, though I found it readable and — until I started feeling uncomfortable about his omission of any kind of evidence or sources for some of his assertions — entertaining.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, Sacha Coward

Review – Infectious

Posted September 29, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 10 Comments

Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them

by John S. Tregoning

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 384
Rating:

Synopsis:
Nature wants you dead.

Not just you, but your children and everyone you have ever met and everyone they have ever met; in fact, everyone. It wants you to cough and sneeze and poop yourself into an early grave. It wants your blood vessels to burst and pustules to explode all over your body. And – until recently – it was really good at doing this… Dr John S. Tregoning has dedicated his career to answering these questions. Infectious uncovers fascinating success stories in immunology and virology, making this book not only a vital overview of infection, but also a hopeful story of ongoing human ingenuity. Covid-19 may be only the first of many modern pandemics. The subject of infection and how to fight it grows more urgent every day. How do pathogens cause disease? And what tools can we give our bodies to do battle? The human body is a marvel – but what happens when it comes under attack? A fascinating guide to why we get sick and how we get better.

It’s worth me admitting up front that it might possibly be time for me to stop reading most popular science that focuses on immunity or disease. I used to find it soothing, but I’m a difficult audience to please now, since I’m not a layperson (MSc in Infectious Diseases), and so my enjoyment/interest tends to hinge on style.

Which is unfortunate in the case of John S. Tregoning’s Infectious, because I found his humour schoolboyish and annoying, and at times, inappropriate for the topic. Half of his footnotes are just terrible jokes, or explaining terrible jokes, and if his students laugh at them in his lectures then either he’s got a lot of in-person charisma or they’re sucking up. Or they’re laughing at him.

The first half of the book is excruciatingly simple from my perspective, which doesn’t help; it’s a decent enough primer for someone who knows just a little bit, though I’ve definitely read others put it across more interestingly. (Honestly, if it’s a primer you want, Philipp Dettmer’s Immune would be my recommendation.) The second half of the book is a bit better, though the whole is studded with some terrible opinions such as:

He doesn’t like wearing a mask, so he agrees with research that says masks don’t help prevent the spread of aerosolised infections (i.e. he explicitly admits to confirmation bias);
He’s had COVID, so he won’t have it again and he can relax about any precautions, and he won’t be able to spread it to anyone else (then proven wrong by his own afterword, where he admits to having caught COVID twice in a year);
Andrew Wakefield has only had to retract two papers, so his lies must be the result of “compounded error” and not blatant corruption (see Brian Deer’s The Doctor Who Fooled The World if you’re unsure on this front)…

I’ll stop, I’ll stop.

The book needed a firm and knowledgeable editor, and the paperback should have been updated to remove some of Tregoning’s more careless (and thus dangerous) predictions about COVID. There were some snippets of interest, and I appreciate his care to pick out neglected scientists (often women) whose work was not properly recognised in their time (or sometimes even now), and his calling-it-what-it-is about James Watson’s racism, etc.

On the other hand, instead of just omitting his “Nuns and Slappers” example, he mentioned that he couldn’t include it because of wokeness. So there’s that.

Altogether, when I look back on it, reading it was a chore and the new stuff I learned was very limited in nature (that the record amount of rice-water stool expelled during cholera infection is allegedly 80 litres, and that we allegedly don’t know how paracetamol or ketamine work; in this moment, I don’t even know if those things are true).

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, John S. Tregoning, non-fiction, science