Review: Rats, Lice and History

Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This bountifully discursive romp through a pestilential history was a really enjoyable read. Ostensibly, a "biography of typhus", the disease is not directly tackled biographically until Chapter XII aftr side treks and apologies and then rushed through from the disease's 15th Century emergence verifiably in the 15th Century. It arose probably in the east and even possibly through battling on Cyprus. From there, it flared with the fires of war on to a final subsidence after playing a pivotal role in the Balkans in WWI. More entertainingly, the book starts with a discussion of biographies themselves in a whimsical yet incisive overview worth reading by literary critics considering modern biographies. Lice get their own chapter, verging on lousy praise, as do rats. The Crusades, affected by pestilence in general if not typhus, get an overview along with plagues of the Old Testament era. I especially liked the considering of Justinian's plague and the arrival of syphilis from the New World in the Columbian Exchange.

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