To the folks who responded to me the other night, I'm happily avoiding working on things I really need to do by crafting some stuff to make that topic on suggested readings if you want to better educate yourselves on epidemics/pandemics, epidemiology, and such.
For those who didn't catch it, I did a bunch of research on this stuff for a thesis, albeit not one in the actual field. It was focused more on how disease is portrayed in pop culture and influences us from there, with a heavy emphasis on the xenophobic tendencies it breeds.
How does this sound? Right now I have 16 recommended readings - all ones I myself have vetted - broken down into 4 major categories.
1st is required reading, a few books that combine to give you a quick look into one pandemic, one that details how epidemiology got started while serving as a case study, and the third taking a broad approach that outlines a whole lot of our modern landscape.
2nd is readings that go further into the current moment and how operations like the CDC work. One was written by a leader of the CDC, describing how epidemiology is done, while the other looks into and explains zoonoses (animal-derived disease) such as this one.
The 3rd category then comprises 6 books that act as case studies, one each for the following - yellow fever, ebola, bubonic plague, rabies, malaria, and AIDS.
The 4th and final category is deep dives, more academic works that analyze cultural reactions, a big history look into plague, and the metaphors presented by tuberculosis, cancer, and AIDS.
The current reading list is this, by category -
Required Reading
Zika: The Emerging Epidemic - Donal G. McNeil, Jr.
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - Steven Johnson
Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond - Sonia Shah
Intermediate
The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humankind's Gravest Dangers - Ali Khan
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic - David Quammen
Case Studies
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death - John Kelly
Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Diabolic Virus - Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever - Molly Caldwell Crosby
The Fever - Sonia Shah
Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus - David Quammen
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic - Randy Shilts
Deep Dives
On Immunity: An Inoculation - Eula Biss
How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS - David France
Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species - Neel Ahuja
Plagues and Peoples - William H. McNeill
Illness as a Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors - Susan Sontag