'The Spanish flu infected one in three people on earth,' she writes, 'or 500 million human beings. 'Both a saga of tragedies and a detective story. British science journalist Laura Spinney sets us all straight in Pale Rider:The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. Laura Spinney demonstrates that the Spanish flu was as significant – if not more so – as two world wars in shaping the modern world in disrupting, and often permanently altering, global politics, race relations, family structures, and thinking across medicine, religion and the arts. Product Details Price 17.99 16.73 Publisher PublicAffairs Publish Date SeptemPages 352 Dimensions 5.4 X 8.2 X 1.0 inches 0. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test. Drawing on the latest research in history, virology, epidemiology, psychology and economics, Pale Rider masterfully recounts the little-known catastrophe that forever changed humanity. In Pale Rider, Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, and from South Africa to Odessa. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I. With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history.

Pale rider by laura spinney