All right, people, nobody panic. We’ve dealt with virulent strains of deadly viruses before, and damn it, we can do it again. All we have to do is hunker down, tape up the windows and periodically send out interns to see if it’s safe. While you’re holed up in your office or home trying to avoid God’s rind-flavored plague, you might as well catch up on some reading. Here’s a list of upbeat books to help keep your mind off this year’s plague (bird flu is so 2008):
Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson Johnson, a far-ranging thinker who once sought to prove that video games are good for you, explored the unhappy marriage of cholera and London in his book Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. Cholera is a bitch, apparently.
See some other book suggestions after the break!








