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The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities,...

Steven Johnson

Start date: June 1, 2015

Finish date: June 30, 2015

Discussion: Book Club 2015

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Book Club 2015

* December 2015 - Violinist's Thumb
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What Members Thought

Jul 11, 2015 Jim rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: science, 1audio, 2non-fiction, historical

I finally got my copy of this, but I also got an ebook copy & see that it has some maps. They're OK, but I didn't really miss them. He describes things well enough that an audio book is fine. In fact, his descriptions of life at the time are fantastic. The setup is a bit long, but it has to be. It's hard to imagine people living in those conditions (drinking out of open sewers!) with so little understanding of disease. It's incredible how far our common knowledge has come.

Well, in some cases, at I finally got my copy of this, but I also got an ebook copy & see that it has some maps. They're OK, but I didn't really miss them. He describes things well enough that an audio book is fine. In fact, his descriptions of life at the time are fantastic. The setup is a bit long, but it has to be. It's hard to imagine people living in those conditions (drinking out of open sewers!) with so little understanding of disease. It's incredible how far our common knowledge has come.

Well, in some cases, at any rate. I found the description of the newspaper ads & remedies incredibly sad because I see so many of them still promulgated today as pseudo-scientific cures. People are still buying supplements & using aroma therapy. A lot of this when I read "Bad Science" & it's just disheartening.

I got the ebook because wanted to go back over his explanation of how cholera mutated. I didn't really care for it because of the way he framed it as a 'desire'. That was OK at first, but later on he said something about a group intelligence that came across as pseudo science. Here's that offending paragraph.

It goes without saying that the bacteria are not in any way conscious of developing this strategy. The strategy evolves on its own, as the overall population balance of V. cholerae changes. In a low-transmission environment, lethal strains die out, and mild ones come to dominate the population. In high-transmission environments, the lethal strains quickly outnumber the mild ones. No single bacterium is aware of the cost-benefit analysis, but thanks to their amazing capacity for adaptation, they’re able to make the analysis as a group, each isolated life and death serving a kind of vote in a distributed microbial assembly. There is no consciousness in the lowly bacterium. But there is a kind of group intelligence nonetheless.

He could have used some statistical analysis (SA) to far better effect. That's what this book is about after all, the birth & use of SA to solve large scale problems. SA shows us what is really happening overall & not just what seems to be happening from what we can see in any one spot. That's his overall point, but I don't recall where he ever comes out & says that specifically.

Interestingly enough, the first epidemic council had just been formed a few years before this outbreak & that's what a lot of the book is about - figuring out how to analyze it. John Snow was the pioneer.

At the halfway point & a bit beyond it's been pretty boring, often a rehash & bunch of detail on what has already been covered in as much depth as I wanted to know. Far too much repetition as the author goes back to tie in the preacher's (Whitehead) observations & the public health commissions. I understand that it is a problem to outline general trends & then go back into the specifics that caused them. Some repetition is inevitable. There are also multiple players, causes, & trends to follow, but he's covering the same ground & facts each time. It's getting very old.

It was interesting the way he points out how the cure for the miasma theory wound up causing more problems based on ignorance, yet ultimately led to Snow being able to gather the necessary statistical data to narrow down the actual cause, still without knowledge of bacteria. That had been discovered, but was ignored by everyone. It also led to being able to solve the problem - eventually. The established theory prevailed far too long due to politics.

I took a break at 5/7 & skimmed through it & 6/7. It's hard to skim in an audio book, but the repetition was awful, so I supplemented with the ebook. It did get interesting at the end of 6/7 & into 7/7 with more about current techniques for statistically looking at cities, including the 311 service. A long stretch considering the title, but he was trying to show that Snow & Whitehead's techniques are still being used. Unfortunately, he's covered the basics already several times.

The epilogue is about doomsday scenarios in modern times from atomic bombs to 9/11 & the flu. I really dislike the way he discusses the latter. Again, he uses 'learn' as if viruses & bacteria could think. He also ignores the fact that deadly organisms are such a minority that they can actually be looked upon as poor mutations. It's not good to kill off your host, after all.

He also seems to think that a city-planet is a desirable goal. WTF?!!! We are becoming more urbanized, though. He does tie this nicely in with the Broad Street epidemic & show some of the dangers we face from all sorts of mass effects biological & mechanical. He reaches pretty far & it's not his area of expertise.

Overall, this would have been an excellent book if it had been about half as long. He tried to cover far too much territory & that led to a lot of repetition. It would probably have been better read as text where I could have skimmed more. As an audio book it was just painful toward the end. ...more

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Apr 21, 2011 Margie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science, data

I've been fascinated with John Snow's Broad Street pump map since I first saw it in Tufte's Visual Explanations. I was very excited, then, to find this book.

It deals less with the map than with the theories that went into the making of the map, with what seems like good reason. Tufte's version of the story goes approximately like this: Snow figured out that cholera was waterborne; mapped the deaths and proximity to the Broad Street pump, thus proving causation; the pump handle was removed; the e ...more

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May 07, 2012 Mitchell Friedman rated it really liked it

Shelves: four-star, liked-reviews, nonfiction

Good. But not long enough or deep enough. And too many extra bits or not enough. But worth keeping and recommending.

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Mar 05, 2011 Bridget rated it really liked it

There's a lot to like about this book. It is a vivid and well researched history of the confluence of factors that came together to help John Snow discover the cause of cholera in London in the 1800's. The first chapter is brilliant, the portrait of the city of London drowning in its own waste is unforgettable. And the book continues to be great when narrating the details of the events that led up to and devolved from the historic removal of the handle of the Broad Street pump.

However, the auth ...more

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Nov 07, 2007 Kathleen (itpdx) rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, lwv-book-group

I really enjoyed most of this book. I like history and, call me weird, epidemiology, so this well written account of an 1854 cholera epidemic in London and the men that found the source of transmission is right up my alley. The author's (Steven Johnson) observations of how cities evolved and the problems (including disease) that people encountered in the process were new to me. He used the stories of two of the men instrumental in discovering the source of the epidemic as a demonstration of how ...more

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