The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

The hunter-gatherers or the early agriculturists couldn’t have formed a city of the size and density of 1850s London (much less today’s São Paulo) even if they had wanted to. To sustain a population of a million people—to keep them fed alone, much less power their SUVs or subways or refrigerators—you need a massive supply of stored energy to keep