I received a copy from the publisher via Netgalley for an honest review.

This was a super interesting non-fiction book to read with real world accounts of the Spanish Flu during WWI. I feel like this story gave so much information, not only of the emotional impact (I.E. stating this made 600 orphans in a matter of weeks in one city) but the horrendously gruesome visuals of people passing away from this insane influenza. I feel like this is an important book that people should have read before or during COVID and maybe would have taken it more seriously. Or perhaps, not that I wish it at all, if COVID deaths had been as visually gruesome with people turning blue and/or bleeding from their ears and so forth, maybe then society would have realized the horrendous situation that was occuring. Oftentimes it is said history repeats itstelf and COVID was 101 years later....I think society got off lucky, to be honest. It could have been so much worse and people need to read this to really understand that.

The only negative I would say is it begins a little slow and dry, reading very much like a text book, however, that does not last long at all. I REALLY enjoyed the last few chapters taking all this information from 1918 and discussing what scientists had begun looking at in 1996 and on with the various pandemics that were potentially thwarted because of them. This subject of disease and epidemiology has always been interesting to me since I first learned of the Black Plague and I will absolutely continue to pick up books like this. Highly recommended if you are interested in learning more about situations such as this.

A thorough retelling of the era of the Spanish Flu evincing broadly our current trials with Covid. Well researched, but doesn't feel like anything new. Barry's The Great Influenza did it better.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the read of Catharine Arnold’s, Pandemic 1918.

The horrors of the disastrous “Spanish Flu” are comprehensively and expertly detailed in this impressive read.

With what is happening currently in our world, it’s not a far-off impossibility to consider how easily some scourge of this enormity could happen again.

Not a quick read, for me, but most definitely, a compelling, engrossing read.

Highly recommended.

Opinions expressed are my own.

What an absolutely terrifying book. I found myself grossly undereducated about this topic, and completely unprepared for how these circumstances would run so close a parallel to current events. More so than any fictional horror or suspense, this book kept me awake at night. Biting my nails and wanting to just hide under the covers. Still, it was always interesting, and I found myself eating up the pages. Highly recommend.

Probably the most important book I've read this year. It was both comforting and terrifying to see how the waves of the Spanish influeza rolled across the world. In some ways it felt so similar to the COVID-19 crisis, but in other ways (so far) the WWI generation had it far worse. It left me more convinced than ever that the current pandemic will not be resolved quickly or easily, but that we must devote our best efforts to doing so.

Buy a copy of this book for anyone you know who doesn't think things are that bad, and/or a copy for those who do.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC for the purpose of an unbiased review.

Absolutely fascinating, and that’s simply after reading the Prologue! Published on Aug 28, 2018, this is an eerie foretelling of past pandemic events, and those yet to come. Although Arnold could not predict the COVID19 pandemic of 2019-2020, the parallels the Spanish Lady, or flu, has with today’s COVID19 is uncanny. The prologue found me fascinated, and as I reach Chapter 1, I am hooked already.

The various stories take you across the globe as you get glimpses of those infected or those touched by the epidemic. Science of the day is interspersed and again, the parallels of the 1918 Flu and the 2020 Covid-19 outbreaks are amazing. A must-read.

I found this book to be immensely interesting. Kudos to the author for her research in finding so many first-person accounts, from a generation almost gone. This has put a human face to the unimaginable terror.

I would recommend reading this book for all history lovers like myself. I would also recommend this book for those who are looking for a model to compare with the current pandemic. There are many parallels.

This is an excellent global examination of the Great Influenza of 1918 - the Spanish Flu. As a New Zealander, the chapter on the late incursion of the flu here after the Armistice was particularly fascinating, but Arnold has written a visceral and gripping account of the spread of the disease around the globe using textual evidence and historical accounts of what it was like to suffer the Spanish Flu, to live in cities with it spreading, to tend those with it, to deal with the dead. Many uncanny symmetries are now obvious, after Coronavirus Pandemic, that were not at the time of writing: there is something particularly haunting in the photographs of the masked, many of them wearing face masks similar to our own. There were pages where the deja vu was overwhelming. The latter chapters, focusing on the genetic typing of the 1918 virus and the possibility of future pandemics were equally uncanny: down to one researcher's account of strolling through a wet market in China and wondering at the potential for future outbreaks. A common plaint of books about the Spanish Flu, including Arnold's, is that it was the great Pandemic we all forgot, one which dropped out of cultural memory and reference. This was true, and work like Arnold's in recovering it was very necessary; now, of course, I imagine readers will be turning to this book to see how history rhymes.

Thank you to the publisher for the copy of this book. Such fascinating reading....a great resource especially with the current pandemic we are facing.

Written for the Spanish flu pandemic centennial, which killed more Americans than World War I, popular British historian Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918 deserves attention as the world grapples with COVID-19. The parallels are striking.

Arnold shows how the first outbreaks were downplayed as little more than common seasonal illness that would soon vanish. Much as the first Spanish flu wave passed, bringing a collective sigh of relief, only to have a second and more devastating wave return in the fall of 1918 and continue into 1919, much of the world today is in progress of reopening as cases increase and health officials and medical experts warn us of worse times ahead. Arnold’s story of the Vick’s VapoRub shortage is reminiscent of our hand sanitizer and toilet paper shortages. The 1918 efforts to stave off the virus by eating or wearing onions, by adding whiskey to a patient’s gruel, or ingesting kerosene on a sugar cube bring to mind more recent suggestions that ultraviolet rays or ingesting or injecting disinfectants might prevent or cure COVID-19. Arnold’s account of the health officer who shot a man in front of a San Francisco drug store because the man refused to wear a mask is a variation on the recent assaults and shootings of those requiring masks by those refusing to wear them.

Demonstrating her extensive research, Arnold fills her book not only with facts and statistics, but also with personal anecdotes of those who survived or, in some cases, succumbed to the 1918 pandemic. Fans of Mr. Selfridge, the PBS Masterpiece series, will be interested in the story of Rose Selfridge’s death after volunteering to nurse the sick in Britain. Those with an interest in literature will enjoy the story about how a young Rocky Mountain News reporter’s recovery from Spanish flu caused her to believe she was spared to fulfill a larger destiny and launched her career as Pulitzer Prize winning author Katherine Anne Porter, who told her influenza story in her novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939). Along with other famous people who survived the 1918 pandemic, such as Walt Disney and Mahatma Gandhi, Arnold also tells memorable stories of ordinary people, such as six-year-old Bill Sardo who had to help his parents build coffins in the basement of their small Washington, D.C. funeral home and who later provided a heart-breaking, but familiar account, of how social distancing and fear “tore people apart.”

Arnold takes readers onto World War II battlefields and troop transport ships. She takes them around the world not only to Europe, the United States, and Canada, but also to places such as New Zealand, India, South Africa, and Ghana. In the final chapters, she takes them into research labs as scientists and medical professionals work to solve the mysteries of the 1918 pandemic, even unearthing long-buried corpses, in hopes of avoiding catastrophic pandemics of the future.

Originally published August 28, 2019

Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Catherine Arnold for providing a review copy of this book, which is as appropriate in 2020 as it was when written for the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic centennial.

I remember hearing about the 1918 Pandemic, but I don't ever remember learning much about it in school. As we're currently in the middle of the 2020 pandemic, i was interested in reading this book.

In addition to facts, the author includes people's first-hand experiences that made this more than dry details. Medical records and diary entries show the devastation. Just heartbreaking, especially with how many lives were lost (~100 million). It was certainly more than "just the flu." It's a fascinating, yet scary, book.

Wow,I’ve known about this pandemic,even visited a graveyard where my relatives were buried. Looked at the hundreds of graves where troops coming back from the war had succumbed to the virus. Very sobering book and scary with the current environment we’re in! Very fascinating and fast read,try it, well worth the time!

This book was incredible. It is estimated 20 million people died in WWI. Just as that terrible debacle was maybe slowing down a new killer rose up to take war's place. The Spanish flu. Spanish, not because it started there, because Spain was neutral in WWI and didn't have a news blackout. I have always wondered about that. I have also always wondered how 100 million people could die of the "flu" and people know nothing of it today in the COVID era. My great aunt Katie died in 1918 of the Spanish flu. She was 18 years old. This disease was cruel. Instead of the usual flu taking the old it took young people, in the prime of life. It took others too but it especially liked people in their teens and twenties and very healthy. The brilliance of this book is not the statistics but the voices speaking from that time as they talk again and are heard. They talk of the days leading up to the flu, the parades, and the innocence. They talk of having the disease and how painful it was, they talk of watching their loved ones die from it. They talk of running out of coffins, bodies stacked like wood, mass graves, and the smell. They talked of grief. One little girl told how she loved church bells until they became synonymous with funerals. The book talked about the heroism of the medical people who fought the disease, many of them dying also. I had to stop reading this book sometimes because of the sadness I felt for these people. People are so resilient because life goes on and they got on with it. I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this book in exchange for a review.

This is a wonderful resource that I recommend for anyone interested in the WWI-era influenza pandemic. There are any number of massive histories of the pandemic out there, but this collection of individual voices fills a gap in the literature.

The author did a brilliant job of telling the story of the Pandemic of 1918 and intertwining the first hand stories of those that were affected by the virus. The emotions of the first hand accounts are riveting. The chronological work of how the virus swept across the world was very interesting. The circumstances that lead to the pandemic are a tangled web that shows no one was immune from the Spanish Flu. The fact that documents show that in some case it could have been prevented are amazing. Knowing that yes the Spanish Flu was huge but to see those figures in black and white is mind boggling. This was a wonderful book for anyone that wants to know more about this subject. Everyone that is interested in World War I should also read this book.

(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.)

Before AIDS or Ebola, there was the Spanish Flu — Catharine Arnold's gripping narrative, Pandemic 1918, marks the 100th anniversary of an epidemic that altered world history.
In January 1918, as World War I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread across the globe. In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers referred to it as Flanders Grippe, but world-wide, the pandemic gained the notorious title of “Spanish Flu”. Nowhere on earth escaped: the United States recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war) while European deaths totaled over two million.
Amid the war, some governments suppressed news of the outbreak. Even as entire battalions were decimated, with both the Allies and the Germans suffering massive casualties, the details of many servicemen’s deaths were hidden to protect public morale. Meanwhile, civilian families were being struck down in their homes. The City of Philadelphia ran out of gravediggers and coffins, and mass burial trenches had to be excavated with steam shovels. Spanish flu conjured up the specter of the Black Death of 1348 and the great plague of 1665, while the medical profession, shattered after five terrible years of conflict, lacked the resources to contain and defeat this new enemy.
Through primary and archival sources, historian Catharine Arnold gives readers the first truly global account of the terrible epidemic.

In short, this book is about the Spanish Flue and the devastating effect it had during the early 20th century. But it is so much more than that.

While this could have just been all about the facts, the author has allowed the voices of the time speak, and that makes it so much horrific and harrowing a read. It lets the words from diaries and medical records speak and convey the staggering costs. The stories of soldiers trying to stave off the flu while injured just broke my heart. So many lives - approximately 100 million - were lost. Horror in anyone's language.

A must-read for anyone interested in our medical history. A recommended read for anyone interested in our history in general.


Paul
ARH

I've always been fascinated by the 1918 influenza pandemic, mostly because I'm TERRIFIED of it. Pandemic 1918 does something I can't recall seeing in any other book on the subject - it deals with the global impact of this event, not just its effect on the US and Europe, which makes one realize the true scope of the horror (and be even more petrified by it, something I didn't think was possible). My only issue with the book is that it maybe tries to do TOO much with the eyewitness accounts it uses; you never get a real sense of connection to any one person, place, or story. That being said, it's a compelling overview of the pandemic for anyone interested in a big picture view of the thing. Recommended...after you get your flu shot!

I received a digital ARC from the publisher via Netgalley.

100 years ago, Boston welcomed back some soldiers from World War I and the flu began to spread once again in the US. Lots of first person accounts about a horrible time and disease. If you have never done any research on the topic, this is definitely a good place to start for a overarching explanation of the pandemic.

Definitely a bit dry, I had to slice the book up to read it. Other books that I've read about the same topic have gone faster.

I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.

I enjoyed Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History. It is something that I have always been interested in this part of our history, as I have family that were affected by this.
5 stars.

Brilliant look at the Spanish flu

I loved this book. Based on first person accounts, the book could have descended into a maudlin mess but Catherine Arnold keeps the story on a well-paced, even keel. She did this by framing the pandemic in the current events of the day, including World War I. Make no mistake about out, the book was frequently heartbreaking, but that is to be expected from the subject matter. I recommend this book for anyone interested in history.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.