Jake’s Reviews > The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History > Status Update

Giving myself a gold star. I can do this. I can get through this. Hang tough.

Chapter 29, perhaps one of the worst of the book for its lack of cohesion. A series of unrelated, disjointed paragraphs randomly stitched together.

Chapter 30, sadly, one of the best of the book, outlining the toll on marginalized peoples of color around the world.

God-awful slog, in every way imaginable. A pox on the derelict editor.

Kinda tedious. Lots of name dropping. Can't keep track of who's who. But it reads like a detective novel.

Mixed feelings. Just now getting to 1918, after plodding through necessary but meandering sidebars on the history of medicine.

Not quite tuned in to the writing style just yet. One paragraph rarely flows into the next, although one does get a top-down sense of unity chapter by chapter. Line by line, though, it's awkwardly wordy.