I thoroughly enjoyed this historical perspective on the inequalities that the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare. Highly recommend.

I had high hopes for this book, but there was not a consistent thesis and I don't feel as if Bonhomme had enough of a theoretical framing of the disjointed research projects to tie them together into a cohesive idea.

In "A History of the World in Six Plagues", Edna Bonhomme has examined both the sociological origins of plague response as well as the sociological impact of those plague responses among a particular subset of the sufferers in each presented situation. I understand how many reviewers expected the book to focus on the purely medical/scientific aspects of these plagues, but that misunderstanding of the focus of the book should not be laid upon the author. This is a sociology text not an epidemiology one. The bias they want to ascribe to Bonhomme only arises because they came to the book with preconceived expectations about what the book was going to be about.

In any event, the book does a very competent job in explaining the basics of the plagues being examined with a thumbnail view of the sociopolitical situation surrounding the population Bonhomme chooses in order to showcase the effects the plague and medical response to it upon that given population. Bonhomme has chosen to focus on populations she has a personal connection to which does tend to lead her astray by bringing a bit too much of her personal responses upon the populations she is examining. Still, she provides a very well researched and well cited narrative focused on using primary sources to provide their unvarnished observations, thoughts, and responses to these plagues. Bonhomme's care and concern for the people who experienced these plagues is evident and presents a strong theme of never forgetting the importance of the individual when examining such widespread tragedies.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the opportunity to read this advance copy.

Edna Bonhomme attempts to view plagues through the lens of race and socioeconomics. Each chapter started with an outline of the plague, but she often got caught up in her message and failed to return to the plague. Although I had high hopes for this book, it fell flat and often got lost in tangents. Her main message, black people were often more negatively effected by plagues is well-known. By bringing in her own experiences, Bonhomme took away from the stories she told to illustrate her arguments.

At this point, there are a gazillion A History of the World in [insert number] [insert plural noun]. Because I enjoy reading history of medicine, despite my doubts about an overused approach, I requested review copy of this title. I am very glad I did.

What I particularly like about A History of the World in Six Plagues is the approach it takes. The focus here isn't medical research or brilliant scientists or rich patrons who funded the scientists—it's marginalized people, the disproportionate impact plagues have had on them, and the legacy left behind by plagues. If you're interested in issues of social justice this is a read you will find very valuable. Bonhomme blows open the heroic tales we expect and instead focuses on the struggle for survival and how people have accomplished it against the odds.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

My thanks to both NetGalley and Atria/One Signal Publishers for an advance copy of this book that looks at how the polices that medical and governments put into place to deal with epidemics and outbreaks, show the lack of lessons learned from past incidents, making things sometimes much worse, and hurting those who are already at the margins of survival.

Health issues are a political issue, one that we seem unable to deal with either controlling the price of, dispensing aid, or how far a government can go to help, or in some cases hinder people. Health is also a way of controlling people. One can't go far in life if one is sick constantly. Health is also a question of bias. Poor people have disease. The other has disease. We can't let them in here, because we can't let out pure children get sick. Everyone becomes an expert, and those who have trained, or have experienced diseases and outbreaks, even prevention are ignored. And people die. A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19 by educator and writer Edna Bonhomme is a study of how the ways of dealing with diseases, from ignoring to containment, created many lessons, most of them ignored, that still continue to hurt people today.

The book begins with the author discussing being ill as a child, with typhoid. The author spent months in a hospital, trying to get healthy, and not making others ill. The author is also of Haitian background and as this was the time of HIV and Haitians were being used as scapegoats for many ills, the author has a familiarity with the way that health issues can be used to control, and cut-off people, with the excuse of helping others. One thing that author makes clear is that no one seems to learn anything from outbreaks or pandemics. There is always the same fear, the same problems, the same deniers, and the fears of treatment. And of finding someone, usually marginalized people to blame.

The book looks at a variety of different outbreaks from Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola, and COVID-19 and looks at fear, discrimination and lack of empathy affects many different people. I was amazed as I read that almost everything came down to it being someone' fault. China, poor black slaves, Haitians, gays, dirty people. This looks at particular people and is not a book that covers the history of the pandemics, just how these dealing with diseases reflect the feelings of many in government. Which continues today. As we memory-hole Covid, and continue the same failed polices, insurance based on jobs, a lack of preventative health programs, the author suggests that we are just making time until the next big pandemic, and how many rights might be sacrificed, and more money and control gained by select people. A interesting book, one that left me thinking about a lot of different things, none of them good.

I think the editors did a great disservice to this book by giving it a title that is clearly evocative of another recently published and well-received work, "Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. Aside from the title, these two books have very little in common. "Pathogenesis" is a typical popular-science book about how infectious diseases have influenced human civilization (and was conceived as a much-needed update to another famous work, "Plagues and People"). Edna Bonhomme's book is more of a personal essay, focusing on issues of identity. As she writes in the prologue:

„As a historian of science trained in biology and public health, I analyze those histories with acuity, and as a working-class person of Haitian descent, I approach pandemics with compassion”.

I agree with other reviewers that this book was too political and biased for my taste. But I guess I was misled by the title, I suppose for some people it can be a very rewarding read.

Thanks to the publisher, Atria Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this book is misleading and most certainly not a history of the world in six plagues. I was expecting a chronological account of society and disease over time, instead I feel like this book was lacking scope and filled with personal anecdotes. While the historical elements of the disease origins and spread are well researched and clearly explained, the author undermines herself by then discussing in great detail some singular element or a single effected group for the rest of the chapter. Overall, I'm sure there's an audience for a book like this, of people concerned with how disease shapes marginalized communities and how disease control and prevention measures are rooted in colonialism. It's certainly an important topic, but it was gravely misrepresented with the current title, which caused great disappointment.

The idea of this book is basically an informative one. But as a study of the causes and how epidemics spread Bonhomme has let her personal opinions affect the way these diseases are presented. The way she presented the HIV/Aids disease section spends more time on her complaints as to how her friends in Hatian and American were treated (or not treated) is the larger part of this section. If you want to turn this into a socialogical polemic, be my guest but don't try to pass it off as a history.

When it comes to discussing Haiti, she never discusses how (or explains) the disease there exploded as compared to how the disease was handled by the other community on the Island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic. The DR exists in the same area as Haiti but seems to be able to concentrate onn the healthcare of their nation without blamining the occrance of the disease on the USA. Having moved from Haiti, then the USA and now Germany, she seems to think every problem in the World has to be solved by the US.

Personally I find it a little comical, that she choses to live in a country that suffers from racism, and is only eighty years away from a government that murdered it;s own citizens for being homosexual, mentally ill or physically deformed.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

This was not the book I expected to read. I expected more information of how each of those 6 plagues effected their victims, what sorts of care they got, and what percentage died, along with any public health (as it existed in the time and place) measures were attempted. Instead, I got a lot of sociology and discussions of racism and sexism. I do not dispute that racism, sexism, and nationalism play a key part in stemming disease, along with wealth disparity and non-white over-representation in prisons – a petri dish for any contagious disease. I expected the book to focus on the diseases and good and bad attempts at determining their cause and cures.

There were many infamous plagues throughout history that were left out, including the Justinian Plague in the 6th century.

There is a great deal about the medicalization of blackness, or non-whiteness. There is evidence of sexism within medicine, as evidenced by who drugs are tested on, the vast differences in how men and women are treated at hospitals when having heart attacks. The sociology is important, but I was looking to read of the science of the diseases.

I thought a better job could have been done with the racial protests over such things as the George Floyd murder protests during Covid-19. That was one thing that some white racists used to show that it’s not a real “thing”, as no Covid outbreaks were reported from these political actions. Perhaps more could have been said about that?

Still, it’s very showing how history rhymes with itself, in how some ebola deniers existed just as how there are Covid deniers now. They’re in a different place, in a different time, but it’s something “they” came up with, and resistance to vaccines. It’s notable that distrust of public health goes along with nationalism. The obsession with monkey meat and other bush meat in Ebola is the same as the current obsession with Haitians eating dogs and cats as an attempt to "other-ize".

The author has a "different" writing style, and I found it detracting in places, to the point where it lost my interest a few times.

I thought that this book could have been great. I learned during COVID that for various reasons, racialized communities fared far worse than non-racialized ones and I wanted to learn more about this for other epidemics/pandemics. But I found that there was not a lot of info on the actual bugs/diseases, for example, I learned more about Virginia Woolf than about influenza in the influenza chapter. I also disliked the writing style which I found overflowery to the point where having to parse sentences interfered with pacing. The only worthwhile chapter I read was about trypanosomiasis. I stopped reading after the chapter on HIV. Thank you to Netgalley and Atria/One Signal Publishers for the advance reader copy.

What a powerful book,!!! illness hav such a big impact on the world and its progress and its return to dark ages. A trend that has repeated throughout history.

This book didn’t really tell a history of plagues, rather essays about how plagues have affected specific populations were affected by each plague - what were the leaders of countries affected doing, what preventions and cures were found, and she finalizes with her own recommendations. I feel like this book was very political and was super opinionated rather than based on facts.

I was very excited to read this book. Sadly, it did not live up to my expectations. Meandering and tangential, with many errors that I certainly hope will be corrected before publication. This book needs some thorough editing before being turned loose in the world. Reads like a grad school thesis.

This is a non fiction book like nothing other.

This is not a disease book, nor a scare book - this is a treatise that brings together, via the history of disease a true account of the racism and classism of the world and how the divisions that we are all aware of future exacerbate the death and destruction that follows.

Edna Bonhomme writes like a poet and she lightly includes personal stories, great literature and factual information as we tour the world history of disease. Hailing from Haiti, Bonhomme highlights Port-au-Prince but includes Africa, the United States and plenty of European History. She discusses Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola, and COVID-19.

This is a call to justice, before the next plague #atria #ahistoryoftheworldinsixplagues #ednabonhomme

This was NOT the book that I was expecting to read.
I thought I would be reading about plagues and how to contain them.

This book is really not that much about the plagues.
The plagues mentioned are: sleeping sickness, the 1918 Flu, Ebola, AIDS, Covid, and cholera.

HOwever, the book delves into how people, mostly minorities are herded into a quarantine and left with little or no medical attention.

This book would be top notch if the author had stayed on the subject. However, she takes the reader into Virginia Woolf and her bed when she got the Spanish Flu. I don't think that this really fit into the narrative and I was lost when the author did a book review in the middle of the book.

I could see including the sleeping sickness, because it was the first time that the Germans used the Concentration Camp system. This fit into the authors narrative.
The same with Ebola. The Liberian residents herded into a quarantine zone was also very useful.

The other plagues? Not so much. AIDS was in prison, the ladies were confined, but were there NOT because of their illness. It was due to crime.

This book needs a heavy handed editor that will parse it down to making the argument for the author, that plagues are used to confine people.

Edna Bonhomme's History of the World in Six Plagues is an unusual book. It is clearly well researched and reflects serious study and thought. It will provide perspectives and information that virtually any reader is not familiar with - there is clearly something to be gained from reading this book. But it is neither "a history of the world" nor a book about these six plagues.

The book is not truly a history of the entire world. It focuses almost entirely on North America, Europe, and Africa. Bonhomme is still able to tell her story and make her point - but it is not really global in scope.

The book is also not really about the plagues that are discussed in the analysis. They do set a context for her analysis and underlie much of what she discusses. But if the reader really wants to learn about how COVID, AIDS, Spanish Flu, Cholera, etc. broke out, how they were treated, how they were eventually controlled (if, indeed, all of them ARE under control), etc., there are far better and more comprehensive books out there.

Rather, these plagues are used as a trigger point/context for discussing various groups that have been marginalized and ill-treated by society. And, indeed, this book is more about those groups than the plagues. That is a far more narrow niche than the book's title implies. But if one wants to better understand the treatment of slaves in America during cholera outbreaks of the 19th century or how colonialism impacted native tribes in colonial Africa during the outbreak of sleeping sickness in the 19th century, etc., this book does an excellent job. Virtually any reader - even one who is a true student of world history - will find ample new material and a perspective that has hardly ever been advanced on some of these groups.

In short, there is much to be gleaned in reading Bonhomme's book and it clearly has a place on the historians' bookshelf. Just understand what A History of the World in Six Plagues is truly about.

Edna Bonhomme wrote A History of the World Out of Six Plagues out of an embodied experience of an extended illness and being bedridden. The journey for her looks at the juxtaposition of race, class or poverty and the spread of disease. She deals with contagion on plantations, sleeping disease quarantines that heralded German concentration camps, flu outbreaks, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS as its contained in prisons with the bodies of women restricted and abused and the lack of care. This she does over the centuries and around the world.

Wham Bonhomme shows us is that how we face disease and how we choose to help or not help those impacted by disease is a reflection on our inhumanity that already lines the innards of culture. She covers a swath of those impacted by illness well beyond her and her time including the impact of illness on literature like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. As much as we try to contain disease it refuses to obey as do the people being studied by those.

The fight doctors had in Britain over trying to inform the public about influenza reminded of the most recent historical impact of covid and the hard push from societal forces who denied its existence, attacked those who would wear masks as bodies stacked up and took umbrage at their own vulnerabilities with fear masked as denial. It seems human beings never learn.

The cruelty with which German doctors like Robert Koch treated Africans as they studied sleeping sickness which came from tsetse flies boggles the mind. Racism is always present as those who are in decided seats of power experimented with poisons or medicines that they knew did more harm than good causing more pain, death and even blindness. But they were only Africans and it was for the good of white people or colonial Germany which is why the disease became of any note. When it was just Africans around Victoria Lake it was less an issue.

Bonhomme notes how contagion breaks up peoples sense of community especially during isolation or limiting their freedom. People will spread a disease rather than be hemmed up and suffering or do not have any symptoms. Disease reveals our need for one another as much as our stupidity and cruelty in looking of cures or just making people comfortable when there is no immediate cure. The common denominator through this book was the human need to deny our own vulnerabilities and need for one another across lines of race, gender, and class. A History of the World is a fascinating and engaging read that does not turn into an academic bore. It’s an instructive of what we don’t see to learn from which is the past. Bonhomme book is a light of hope to show us that we are and can be better than our history subject to the oppressions of race, class and gender.

I worked in the emergency room during the covid pandemic. I witnessed people suffer in their final hours. I couldn't imagine what the people in this book went through all those years ago. This book is well reported and tells us some hard truths that we needed to know. This book was great. I will be adding a physical copy to my library.

"A History of the World in Six Plagues" by Edna Bonhomme offers a fascinating and insightful examination of how pandemics have shaped human history. Bonhomme skillfully weaves together historical narratives and public health insights, highlighting the profound impact of plagues on societies across different eras. Her engaging prose and thorough research illuminate the interconnectedness of disease, politics, and culture. The book is both educational and compelling, providing readers with a nuanced understanding of how plagues have influenced the course of history and continue to shape our world today.