The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

I'm going to try yet again to blog a brief bit about the books I read. My motives are selfish, of course. As I get older, I find that I easily forget a lot of what I read. Sometimes it makes me wonder if reading is a waste of time, but I do think there's some truth that in reading, you're exposed to ideas that change, inform, and inspire you in ways you may not even perceive. At the very least, books can help keep me from living too much in the echo chamber of my work and life in the hills. By blogging about the books (if I can keep it up), I hope to remember a little more, and think a little more about what I read.

Anyway, I've read a bunch of books in the last couple weeks, and will blog about them in a series of posts. First, a pair of loosely related books. The Last Town on Earth is a novel about a town in the Western US that tries to quarantine itself from the rest of the world during the Spanish flu epidemic towards the end of World War I. The Ghost Map is a nonfiction book about the men who helped bring an end to the outbreaks of cholera that frequently chewed through cities in the 1800s. I pair these because the first tells a story of people fighting disease by trying to fight human nature. The second tells a story of fighting disease with rational thought. Guess which one is more effective.

There was a great geek moment in The Ghost Map. Cholera is a water-borne disease, but in the early 1800s, the dominant theory was that of the "miasma". That is, people were quite convinced it was airborne. The book focused on a single outbreak that was very closely studied by John Snow. Snow mapped out all the known cases he could link to the outbreak and found the source of the outbreak. That was the easy part. The hard part was convincing everyone else. At that time in London, most people got their water from one of many wells throughout the city. Snow therefore produced a map including the wells and the known cases of cholera in that epidemic. But this map alone isn't enough to distinguish the water-borne theory from the air-borne theory of miasma. Until you measure distance not as the bird flies, but as man would walk through the serpentine streets of London. Then, the pattern jumped out clear as day. Thus, the great geek moment: finding a measure that would distinguish between these two theories. That's great science.

As for the books themselves, The Last Town was an OK beach read (though not exactly uplifting!). The Ghost Map was rather good, but would have been better if the author had cut his insistent paean to city living. Not only does it fall on deaf ears with me (as I look out my window here at home, I can see for miles, but I can't see more than a couple houses), but it also interrupted the flow of his story. Moreover, whatever you think about city living, the real story was that breakthroughs like Snow's make city living possible. He mentions this in passing, but his effusing about cities drowns out the more important point. Besides, the internet is rapidly bringing most of the benefits of city living he cites out here to us in the sticks.