this was an absolutely fascinating read. I’m not a science buff, but I struggled through the descriptions of more nuanced bacterial and viral elements of this book to get to the social implications of these plagues, as promised by Kennedy. I won’t lie and say that I felt like the world can attribute much of it’s development and evolution to plagues as Kennedy seems to assert, but I also can never again claim that plagues did not have a major role to play in the evolution of our understandings of race, class, and capital. Which is a lens I never would have thought to explore, but is one I now will never forget - seeing the world through this public health lens has really made me step back and consider all of the other intersections and influences that I’ve been ignoring. This is a fascinating study of the history of the ways we became what we are now, which makes the fall-out from our most recent plague feel less “unprecedented” and more like something that will have lingering impacts for us as we move, slowly, forward.