Johnson, Steven.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.

New York, Riverhead Books, 2006. 16 cm x 23.5 cm. 299 pages. Original Hardcover with dustjacket and protective Mylar covering. Very good condition with only minor signs of external wear.

Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author and media theorist. Johnson is the author of nine books, largely on the intersection of science, technology, and personal experience. He has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and most recently the hyperlocal media site outside.in. A contributing editor to Wired, he writes regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and many other periodicals. Johnson also serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, including Medium, Atavist, Meetup.com, Betaworks, and Patch.com. David Quammen reviewed The Ghost Map (2006) for The New York Times, writing, “There’s a great story here, one of the signal episodes in the history of medical science, and Johnson recounts it well… His book is a formidable gathering of small facts and big ideas, and the narrative portions are particularly strong, informed by real empathy for both his named and his nameless characters, flawed only sporadically by portentousness and small stylistic lapses.” He called the book, and Johnson, “intriguing” and “smart.” Entertainment Weekly gave The Ghost Map an ‘A’ rating, saying, “The Ghost Map asks the reader to imagine a situation in which ‘you could leave town for a weekend and come back to find 10 percent of your neighbors being wheeled down the street in death carts.’ For inhabitants of mid-19th-century London, cholera rendered this apocalyptic vision a terrifying reality… Johnson traces the courageous and ultimately successful attempt by an anesthetist/scientist/sleuth named John Snow to discover how the disease was transmitted. And he does so in a way that brings to nightmarish, thought-provoking life a world in which a swift but very unpleasant death can be just a glass of water away.” (Wikipedia).

• Keywords: 19th Century · British History · English History – Rare · History of Epidemics · London · London – Section of English History Collection · Medicine – Rare
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9781594489259
• Inventory Number: 78118AB

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