4/5 stars Recommended if you like: epidemiology, history, 20th Century history, medical history, Spanish flu

I was fully onboard with this book, loved reading it, and was prepared to give it 5 stars, until...Arnold got the flu strain wrong. The Spanish flu wasn't H5N1, anyone interested in epidemiology worth their salt knows that. It was H1N1. Y'know, the same strain as the 2009 pandemic? Well, not the exact same strain, but there was actually a whole thing about it at the time and the point is that H1N1, one of the predominate flu strains every year, is the same one that mutated into a highly-pathogenic subclade in 1918. This is a fairly massive unforced error on Arnold's part and makes me question the veracity of the rest of the book, despite how much I enjoyed it.

The chapters are a decent length, I don't think any of them are more than maybe 25 pages (?), and each is balanced pretty well between anecdotal stories about the pandemic and medical fact (or 'fact'?). I obviously knew about the Spanish flu before reading this, but I had never taken the time to really learn about it, so I found the contents of this book to be pretty interesting. There's also now the obvious connection between the 1918 pandemic and the 2019 one. I was actually surprised about how much some of the symptoms of the Spanish flu matched with covid (air hunger, cytokine storm, etc.). But I was also surprised at just how brutal the Spanish flu was. I didn't know about the cholera-like cyanosis or the hemorrhaging.

I think Arnold really did capture the horror of what it was like living through the pandemic. It's hard to imagine what it must've been like at the time, though I think I'll probably check out some of the first-person accounts Arnold mentions. Testament of Youth is one that's been on my radar for a while, so maybe it's finally time to pick that one up. Again, it's eerily similar to covid, and just like how the Spanish flu 'vanished' from collective memory due to trauma, I kind of see covid going the same way.

And my automatic reaction is "it was November 1918, you have no idea how glad I was to stop seeing ads telling me to buy victory bonds in the paper everyday"

RECENT ACQUISITIONS Artists’ Books: 1918 and Covid 2020

Throughout this strange year, we’ve continued to support local artists through purchases for the library’s Book Arts and Fine Press Collection. Two new acquisitions stand out as notable works representing our time and place: Covid 2020 by photographer Laura Migliorino and 1918 by printmaker Fred Hagstrom (Strong Silent Type Press). 

Covid 2020 features photographs primarily of the Minneapolis North Loop neighborhood during the early months of Covid-19. We see shuttered doors, empty highways, and a few signs of hope. 

1918 includes statistics and personal letters from the 1918 Spanish Flu, along with images from that pandemic which killed 650,000 people in the United States. The images and messages from over 100 years ago eerily relate to today’s pandemic. Fred notes in the colophon that the book was “printed in a socially distanced time with no assistants.”

Meet the 102-year-old who survived the 1918 flu, cancer, and now COVID-19 💪🏼