Year published: 2006
Category: nonfiction (history of science); a true medical mystery
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson is “the story of London’s most terrifying epidemic and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world.” The ‘epidemic’ was actually a sudden, severe outbreak, of cholera, in 1854. Whether this infectious disease event was London’s “most terrifying”–more than, say, the Black Death–is another question.
Despite the hyperbole on the cover, this book is a highly readable narrative that tells the events in London’s neighborhood around the Broad Street pump, when entire families went from perfect health to death in less than a day. This history of science tale is combined with a perspective on the rise of modern cities. The Ghost Map is a story about an unsustainable concentration of humans suffocating in their own waste; about a microbe that took advantage of the situation; and about two men who had the pluck and intellectual capacity to find the cause of the disease. Continue reading
and 
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Enter to win a signed paperback of new indie release The Final Reality by Steve Martino (2012). Indie science/medical thriller with political themes.
I’m not the only person who thinks so. The book was included in International Thriller Writers’ critical anthology 
, on the best thrillers of all time.
), Julie Chibbaro (
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