The Great Influenza

I read John Barry's The Great Influenza because I liked Rising Tide, but Influenza is a disappointment. The semi-mystical parts about the scientific process are plain awful, and the science is not explained well -- just compare Barry's account of the biochemistry of immunity, or Avery's work on DNA, with Judson's explanation of the same subjects in The Eighth Day of Creation. The most interesting (but very brief) part of the book to me was something I'd never heard before -- the possibility that Paul Lewis of the Rockefeller died of yellow fever by smoking a cigarette contaminated with the pathogen -- three years after Sinclair Lewis (no relation) published Arrowsmith, one of my favorite books when I was a teenager. (Barry apparently is implying that Paul Lewis committed suicide by deliberately contracting yellow fever, which I think is improbable.) In Arrowsmith, Leora dies from a contaminated cigarette, and the McGurk Institute is the fictional Rockefeller. I'm going to read Arrowsmith again, which I haven't opened for probably 30 years.