Enjoyed this book, though I found the title a bit misleading. Was expecting perhaps 8 discrete diseases but I should have focused more on the history of the world part….The author illustrates the effects of disease from the time when there were multiple human species up to the present.
He has a strong anti religion bias which seems to cause him to occasionally slant parts of the stories he tells, but everything is generally well researched and organized…. If you only read one disease book….make it guns, germs and steel……and if only two,, try the Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett, but keep this on the list….it goes furthest back
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I had great hopes for this book, but the more I read the further those hopes took a nosedive. For starters, one would think that the book would focus on 8 plagues in some detail. However, the author divided time into 8 periods and discussed, too briefly IMHO, plagues and diseases in that time period and how they shaped/caused history. The author claims that humans no longer lay eggs because 10-12 million years ago (sigh) a virus entered our bodies and destroyed that function. By the end of the book, there was no respect remaining for the book or author. I can honestly say that I think the author needs some help/counseling if he believes his own ideas: China did a better job of controlling Covid-19 than the UK or US. Their numbers are better than the UK or US. They could take some lessons from the Chinese. Socialism is the only way that disease is going to be eradicated. Does he really believe that China reported all their cases? This author had a political agenda and it was quite obvious to this reader. Sorry I wasted my time and raised my BP;)! 304 pages ( )

The first 5 chapters were great - interesting assessment of our ancient history
Gets more preachy and less interesting as he approaches the modern era. ( )

Starting in extreme antiquity (in Earth's hunter-gatherer era for the earliest humans), the author makes a strong case for revising the explanations for many key points in human history based on the role of bacteria and viruses in those transitions. My view of world history will never be the same. This book is enlivened by genetic data previously only published in recent but paywalled academic journals accessible to few readers. The most likely causes of ancient pandemics are also explored. ( )

Plagues and disease shaped many events in prehistory and history.
To me, the most interesting part of this broad survey was the information about DNA variation and diseases in Neaderthals, Homo Sapiens and Denisovan, and the speculation that Homo Sapiens brought disease that caused the Neaderthals to die out, although about 2% of the modern human genome is shared with Neanderthals. Citing the recent book by Graeber and Wengrow on the Neolithic revolution, the auther also discusses the human immunity to smallpox and other diseases of herd animals. These topics were new, but the rest of the story of disease in history was discussed in McNeil's "Plagues and Peoples" from 1976. Bacteria and viruses were protagonists in the Peloponesian War, the growth of Islam, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the counquest of Mexico and the Incas, the rise of the trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves, and in European exploitation of Africa. Christianity rose to prominence in the wake of a series of deadly pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries. The fact that Christians cared for the sick attracted converts.
The author discusses mainly secondary sources in the text, but there are primary references in the bibliography. He has a UK and European moral disdain for the role of the US in history, and in the later parts of the book seems more concerned with supporting progressive political notions of diversity and third world moral superiority than in the medical history of infectious diseases. ( )