Ann Love

I feel like the author has never worked with children. I teach K-8 and cannot think of a single student this book would be decent for. The sentence structure is simplistic and sounds condescending, but much of the word choice is appropriate only for high-school level students ("neutralize" "helical" "exposure").

Text features are minimal. No charts or graphs. No photos (only crude, cartoony illustrations). No captions (because the illustrations were all very generalized - two people shaking hands, a nurse hovering over a patient, etc...). It didn't "bold" or "italicise" any important terminology or glossary words to draw your attention. The glossary itself was hidden at the back (this is fine in books for adults, but in books for students, you want the glossaries in each chapter) and only covered random terminology ("allergy" and "ancestor" are included but not "prion," "lance" or "diagnose"?!). Writers, do children everywhere a favor. Read DK Eyewitness books. Lots of them. Notice how much detail they're able to shove into the book? Not just through text, but glossaries, illustrations, photographs, quotes, text format, maps, sidebars...THIS is what you should be emulating if you want students to a) learn b) enjoy informational texts c) become comprehensive readers.

It also advances the myth that "Ring Around the Rosie" is a poem about the Black Plague (despite no mention of the poem anywhere until the 1790s). The book claims "historians" believe that the poem is about the Black Death, but doesn't cite this claim in any way (indeed, the book doesn't cite anything - way to show students what scholarly work looks like) and goes on to say that the poem was written in the Middle Ages - again, despite being unmentioned until the 1790s and the first actual written record of it occurring nearly half a century later. This urban legend regarding the origins of the poem doesn't even come about until the 1940s (at the earliest). The only people that believe this any longer are those who read every urban legend that pops up in their Facebook feed...

Finally, despite its title, the book doesn't really offer any explanations as to why pandemics are the reason people are alive. It glosses over much about pandemics being the cause of much of science and medicine's advancements. It doesn't really mention genetic mutations that allowed certain peoples and genetic lines to better survive diseases and therefore outbreaks. Everything in the book seems to indicate that we're alive greatly in spite of pandemics - not because of them.… (mere)