Ghost Map

I picked this book up initially because it looked interesting, and only after I checked it out did I realize that I had read a previous book by the same author. I had really enjoyed Everything Bad is Good For You, but it seemed like a terribly different book. This seemed more in the style of Erik Larson's Devil in the White City or Simon Winchester's books.

Anyway, Ghost Map is the story of the discovery, in London, of how cholera is transmitted. Discovery is not quite the word; it was more like grudging realization. But it seemed a watershed moment in the scientific method as applied to epidemic tracking. This didn't have the romance of "Devil in the White City ( while reading it, I referred to it as "the poo book"), but it held my interest, and I learned a lot from it.

Book 50