Going viral

An engaging examination of microbial diseases and their far-reaching impacts on human history.

- NEVIL GIBSON

PATHOGENESIS: How Germs Made History, by Jonathan Kennedy (Torva, $40)

When Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prizewinning Guns, Germs, and Steel appeared in 1997, it changed the course of how history was written. It was no longer just the stage for kings and conquerors, or even social and economic advancement. Anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, linguistics and ecology also had a say.

Among Diamond's insights into how changes in food production and the domestication of animals influenced social and political organisation was the impact of infectious diseases. Although more recent research has challenged his assumptions, some elaborated in the subsequent Collapse, the emphasis on wider considerations has increased.

Peter Frankopan's The Earth Transformed - reviewed in these pages in March - reinterpreted the arc of human history through the lens of environmental and climatic change. An anthropologist and an archaeologist did the same in The Dawn of Everything, while historian Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens remains the gold standard for many readers.

These doorstopper books are not quick reading, due to the amount of knowledge they contain. But Jeremy Kennedy, a lecturer in global public health at Queen Mary University in London and a neophyte in this publishing field, lightens the task.