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Top of the pile
75
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
51/100Critics
77/100Scholars
97/100Author:
Paul Farmer
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
November 17, 2020
Public health expert Paul Farmer offers a new account of the West African Ebola crisis and why it occurred.
What The Reviewers Say
With exceptional empathy and care, Paul Farmer takes us through his experience with that health crisis and the difficult history that made those populations particularly vulnerable.
Instead of a disease thriller or a straight memoir, Farmer’s book is structured almost like an experimental novel, or a time-twisting prestige television drama. The chronology loops back on itself multiple times.
Anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer, based at Harvard Medical School, turns [the common view] of Ebola on its head in his eye-opening, densely detailed, and riveting Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History .
The narrative is supplemented by a deep exploration of the war-torn, strife-filled and tragic history of the region, which the Western world robbed of millions of men, women and children during the centuries of the slave trade — and continues exploiting for its diamonds, palm oil and rubber.
