COMensarations
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Be Prepared II
A Summer book reading list.
Books are great things to learn from. Even some of the fictional material can be highly useful. Especially if the writer has a technological or historical accuracy gene that is dominant.
Here are some things I recommend, if you have a mind to know what might happen if the bird flu jumps to humans....
First off, I recommend some historical background.
I think Tuchmann does a good job with history. However, in her tome A Distant Mirror: The Calamatous 14th Century, she’s VERY ‘dry’. She spends a lot of time talking about things that occured there—plague, schizims, revolt—through the perceptions of a mid-level noble; a count. [Note: The Dukes and above were high-level ones. Knights were low-level, in my opinion.]
However, her discriptions of the impact of the plague and how it swept across Europe in successive waves was insightful. The other historical aspects are interesting as well.
Then there is the novel by Camus, The Plague. It’s a classic. It’s rather ‘dry’ too. But the important message is that just doing your job, especially if your job is important to maintaining the fabric of society, is what one needs to focus on most. [Note: More on this aspect and where one finds the courage to do such things in such times later.]
Additionally, for those who want more action in their readings, we have Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders. This one gives you an idea of how the government might respond to a plague of the nature we’re thinking could happen over the next year or so. Not to mention the usual dose of interesting information about various aspects of our modern world and a thriller, to boot.
Personally, I think Clancy is darn near prescient. His book, Debt of Honor, which was published in ‘94, seems to have been the inspiration for 9/11. I would not put it past our friends in the Middle East to be following up his sequel to the two-part thriller, Executive Orders, now that they’ve got a new toy to play with.
I’m sure there are some other books out there that would be useful. If you know of some, please pass their titles and authors along in the Comments section.