Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu
As Philip Alcabes persuasively argues in Dread, our anxieties about epidemics often stray from the facts on the ground. In a fascinating exploration of the social and cultural history of epidemics, Alcabes delivers a different narrative of disease-one that requires that we reexamine our choice of enemies, and carefully consider the potential motivation of epidemic alarm-bells to further medical, moral, or political campaigns.
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"In this richly detailed and fascinating book, Alcabes explores the meaning of epidemics throughout history, and what our fears of them tell us about ourselves. Like Susan Sontag, he reminds us just how hard it is to see these diseases for what they are."
Barry Glassner, author of "The Gospel of Food" and "The Culture of Fear"
"Exceptionally insightful and persuasively argued, "Dread" is at once a chronicle of the uses and (more often) abuses of the term epidemic and an antidote to the modern tendency to transmute fears of strangers and societal and personal failings into diseases."
Harriet Washington, author of "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present"
""Dread" is an insightful education in how art and science inform each other in a cultural synergy that, even today, keeps us from discerning what is medicine and what is myth. The word "genius" has been debased by frequent use, but this is a work of undeniable genius in the most exalted sense. What Stephen Jay Gould did for natural history, Philip Alcabes has done for public health."
