Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague

by Richard Rhodes

Hardcover

Published January 1, 2004

About the author

Richard Lee Rhodes is an American journalist, historian, and author of both fiction and non-fiction (which he prefers to call "verity"), including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), and most recently, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007). He has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among others.

He is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also frequently gives lectures and talks on a broad range of subjects to various audiences, including testifying before the U.S. Senate on nuclear energy.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

An informative book written early in our journey to understand prions. This short science book is very good in clarifying the early days of investigating Kuru, identifying it as a version of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the early cases of transmissible CJD when growth hormone was still prepared from cadavers, and the early days of the disastrous mad-cow epidemic. Where the book fails in my opinion is in failing to explain the science in detail. The alarmist end is also probably overstated.

[Josh Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great history of the study of Spongiform Encephalopathies and the key moments and players involved. Although not recent, if you are interested in prions, TSE, BSE, mad cows or Kuru it’s definitely worth the read.