Foreign Bodies

An epic story of humanity's struggle against pandemics from the renowned historian and broadcaster

A new and vibrant cultural history, investigating the tangled and complex history of pandemics and vaccines, by bestselling author and historian Simon Schama. With the devastating effects of Covid-19 still rattling the foundations of our global civilization, we live in unprecedented times – or so we might think. But pandemics have been a constant presence throughout human history, as humans and disease live side by side. Over the centuries, our ability to react to these sweeping killers has evolved, most notably through the development of vaccines. The story of disease eradication, however, has never been one of simply science – it is political, cultural and deeply personal. Ranging across continents and centuries, Schama unpacks the stories of the often unknown individuals whose pioneering work changed the face of modern healthcare. Questioning why the occurrence of pandemics appears to be accelerating alarming, he looks into our impact on the natural world, and how that in turn is impacting us. And interrogates how geopolitics has had an often devastating effect on global health. Inspirational and tragic in turn, these are stories of success and failure, of collaboration and of persecution, as humanity struggles to work together in the face of one of our most deadly shared enemies: the pandemic.

Autorentext
Sir Simon Schama's award-winning books, which have been translated into twenty-three languages, include The Embarrassment of Riches, Citizens, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, A History of Britain, The Power of Art, Rough Crossings, The American Future, The Face of Britain and The Story of the Jews. His art columns for the New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism and his journalism has appeared regularly in the Guardian and the Financial Times, where he is Contributing Editor. He has written and presented more than fifty films for the BBC on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy and American politics, and he co-presented the landmark series on the history of world art, Civilisations. Most recently, his History of Now series aired on BBC2 in NovemberDecember 2022. Schama lives in New York and is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations is his twentieth book.

Klappentext

An epic story of humanity’s struggle against pandemics from the renowned historian and broadcaster

Zusammenfassung
An epic story of humanity's struggle against pandemics from the renowned historian and broadcaster