Books like An American Plague by JIM MURPHY

The Great Influenza: A World at Risk

An engaging exploration of the 1854 London cholera outbreak and how Dr. John Snow’s mapping of the epidemic transformed public health, urban planning, and the science of disease transmission.

A comprehensive study of the 14th‑century Great Plague that swept across Asia and Europe, examining its devastating impact on society and the erosion of moral conventions during that period.

A journalistic exploration of emerging infectious diseases, tracing viruses such as Ebola, HIV, and Lassa over five decades and examining how water, antibiotics, warfare, and migration fuel outbreaks.

A richly told story of the collision between nature's smallest organism and history's mightiest empireThe Emperor Justinian reunified Rome's fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals who had separated Italy, Spain, and North Africa from imperial rule. In his capital at Constantinople he built the world's most beautiful building, married its most powerful empress, and wrote its most enduring legal code, seemingly restoring Rome's fortunes for the next five hundred years. Then, in the summer of 542, he encountered a flea. The ensuing outbreak of bubonic plague killed five thousand people a day in Constantinople and nearly killed Justinian himself.In Justinian's Flea, William Rosen tells the story of history's first pandemic—a plague seven centuries before the Black Death that killed tens of millions, devastated the empires of Persia and Rome, left a path of victims from Ireland to Iraq, and opened the way for the armies of Islam. Weaving together evolutionary microbiology, economics, military strategy, ecology, and ancient and modern medicine, Rosen offers a sweeping narrative of one of the great hinge moments in history, one that will appeal to readers of John Kelly's The Great Mortality, John Barry's The Great Influenza, and Jared Diamond's Collapse.