Charles Kenny is a writer-researcher at the Center for Global Development and has worked on policy reforms in global health as well as UN peacekeeping and combating international financial corruption. Previously, he spent fifteen years as an economist at the World Bank, travelling the planet from Baghdad and Kabul to Brasilia and Beijing. He is the author of The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease, Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More, and The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Great for the West. He earned a history degree at Cambridge and has graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and Cambridge.
A New Statesman Book of the Year
Main Selection of both the History Book Club and
the Science Book Club
“In his fact-filled and alarming overview of major infectious
diseases past and present, economist Kenny discusses sources and
vectors of epidemics, the toll of suffering and death, progress in
controlling communicable diseases, and persistent problems.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Kenny contextualizes the Covid-19 pandemic...A worthy primer on a
subject of pressing importance.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A brilliant exploration of what you might think is the most
important topic of the year, but which Charles Kenny shows is the
most important topic of the past five millennia. With clarity,
depth, and wit, Kenny gives us the pandemic big
picture.”
—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard
University, and the author of Enlightenment Now
“Engaging… provides a grand historical view of the critical role
that disease has played in shaping human behavior and
societies.”
—Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the
Last Man
“The Plague Cycle is this year’s must read….If you want to
understand the current COVID-19 crisis and be prepared for what is
likely to come next, read this book.”
—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class
“A completely fresh view on world history—sweeping, humane, and
uncomfortably timely.”
—Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist
“An astute explication of our species’ battles with microbes since
the dawn of human time. An optimist, Kenny argues that humanity has
the tools to conquer infectious diseases.”
—Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague
“Throughout history, infectious diseases have been defeated.
Covid-19 will be defeated too. Charles Kenny’s brilliant The
Plague Cycle is the book of the
hour.”
—Gregg Easterbrook, author of It’s Better Than It Looks
“Compelling…Kenny reminds us that nothing unites us, or divides us,
as powerfully as our infectious
diseases.”
—Kyle Harper author of The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and
the End of an Empire
“Kenny has penned a concise, erudite, and highly readable narrative
probing humanity's protracted and Malthusian battle against deadly
pathogens from malaria and smallpox to cholera and
Covid.”
—Timothy Winegard, author of The Mosquito: A Human History of
Our Deadliest Predator
“Important, timely, and also gripping….Fit to stand beside William
H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples.”
—David Wootton, author of Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm
Since Hippocrates and The Invention of Science
"The Plague Cycle stands in a long tradition of informative
plagues-and-people books…A timely, lucid look at the role of
pandemics in history."
—Kirkus Reviews
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