Laura Spinney

2018: Centenario de la «gripe española»La llamada «gripe española» de 1918, que surgió en realidad entre los soldados norteamericanos que luchaban en Francia durante la primera guerra mundial, fue, c

Read the devastating story of the Spanish flu the twentieth century s greatest killer and discover what it can teach us about the current Covid 19 pandemic Both a saga of tragedies and a detective story Pale Rider is not just an excavation but a reimagining of the past Guardian With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach the Spanish flu of 1918 1920 was the greatest human disaster not only of the twentieth century but possibly in all of recorded history And yet in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I In Pale Rider Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic tracing it from Alaska to Brazil from Persia to Spain and from South Africa to Odessa She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test Laura Spinney demonstrates that the Spanish flu was as significant if not more so as two world wars in shaping the modern world in disrupting and often permanently altering global politics race relations family structures and thinking across medicine religion and the arts Weaves together global history and medic

The epic tale of how one ancient language went global and the scientific quest to trace it back to its roots from the celebrated author of Pale RiderAs the planet emerged from the last ice age a language was born between Europe and Asia by the Black Sea This ancient tongue which we call Proto Indo European soon exploded out of its cradle changing and fragmenting as it went until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China Today those descendants constitute the world s largest language family the thread that connects disparate cultures Dante s Inferno to the Rig Veda The Lord of the Rings to the love poetry of Rumi Indo European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity How did this happen Laura Spinney set out to answer that question retracing the Indo European odyssey across continents and millennia With her we travel the length of the steppe navigating the Caucasus the silk roads and the Hindu Kush We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks Amazon warriors and lion kings the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide In the present Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve those lost languages the linguists archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora What the

La llamada "gripe española" de 1918, que surgió en realidad entre los soldados norteamericanos que luchaban en Francia durante la primera guerra mundial, fue, con sus de 50 a 100 millones de muertos, la mayor de las epidemias sufridas por la Humanidad desde la Peste Negra medieval y la causa de la mayor de las matanzas del siglo xx. Laura Spinney recupera la historia de una epidemia que figura en nuestros libros de historia como una simple anecdota para mostrarnos hasta que punto contribuyo a cambiar la historia del mundo, y lo hace en un libro fascinante, que va siguiendo el rastro de la enfermedad por el mundo entero, de Zamora a Rio y de las minas de Sudafrica a Alaska, y contandonos historias personales que iluminan el drama colectivo.