Preview of When Plague Strikes Summary:

Diseases have taken a greater toll of life than even the most disastrous war, and the enemy is invisible. In When Plague Strikes, Giblin is particularly interested in how the victims of an epidemic behave when faced with a calamity that has rendered them helpless and—in past ages—for which they have no explanation. Even after the plagues temporarily abated, their effects were felt.

Societies in the stricken areas were forever changed. Athens, for example, after its plague in 330 B.C., was sufficiently weakened to help Sparta and her allies win the Peloponnesian War.

Giblin identifies the historical roots of three deadly diseases: smallpox, which originated in ancient Egypt; the bubonic plague (also known as the Black Death), which originated in central Asia in the 1300s; and AIDS, which originated in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1970s. He traces and compares how these diseases were spread...