The Corona Booklist: Nine books to keep you busy during the quarantine
Factfullness
— by Hans Rosling
“Factfulness is one of the most educational books I’ve ever read” — Bill Gates
Your first must-read book should be Factfullness by the late Swedish Professor of public health, Hans Rosling. In this outstanding book, Rosling describes how, despite all the negative media coverage, the world is actually getting better on almost all accounts — and provides a useful framework to makes sense of the world and be aware of our own biases. Especially relevant during in the current COVID-19 media storm.
If you’re only planning on reading one book during your quarantine, make sure it is this one. No book will help you better understand the world. And also better understand fact from fiction in the Corona crisis.
The World is Flat
— by Tom Friedman
How did we get this far? How did a virus that started in Wuhan in December 2019 end up becoming a global pandemic less than 3 months later. In “The World is Flat” Tom Friedman provides some of the answers. The world is more interconnected than ever. Business, travel, commerce and connections are truly global. The interconnectivity of life, really have created as world that in many ways is flat. The flat world makes it easy to trade and easy for global pandemics to terrorise the world (and subsequently coordinate global collaborative responses to pandemics!)
Inferno
— by Dan Brown
Looking for an action novel involving a nerdy symbolist, deciphering doomsday predictions, while working closely with the head of the WHO in the race against time to stop a deadly virus from spreading into the world? Dan Brown has you covered.
Guns, Germs and Steel
— by Jared Diamond
Have we been here before? The most cited cases of a previous analogues pandemics are the common plague and the Spanish flu. However, Jared Diamonds’ classic offers a great narrative of how European explorers conquered the Americas — and what role geography and natural immunity played in the first big wave of globalisation in the 15th and 16th Century.
Love in the Time of Cholera
— by Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the time of Corona? No booklist would be complete without a romantic novel. And what better book to read than Garbriel García Márquez award-winning classic. Love likely won’t cure you from the Corona virus (or Cholera), but pictures of you reading the book while snuggling up on the couch will surely make for an excellent social media post!
How I learned to understand the world
— by Hans Rosling
Okay, I might have an intellectual crush on Hans Rosling. I admit it. But his autobiography provides, on some accounts, an even better perspective on how to understand the world than Factfullness. From his early work in Mozambique, to his assistance in the Ebola crisis, to his work on establishing The Gapminder Foundation— the book underline the importance of focusing on facts, science and data to make the best decisions for global health.
DON’T PANIC: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
— by Douglas Adams
While COVID-19 is very very serious, no public health official ever recommended hoarding shops for food and toilet paper (really guys?) and spending your entire day on facebook causing widespread panic by sharing unreliable (i.e. fakenews) personal accounts from a nurse or CEO who overnight became a public health expert. Instead they all say something to the tune of “take all the precautions we recommend — and don’t panic!”.
And what better book to read than one with “DON’T PANIC” on the cover!
“It is said that despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words ‘DON’T PANIC’ in large, friendly letters on the cover.” — From the book
Homo Sapiens
— by Yuval Noah Harari
How did infections diseases develop in the first place? And how did our move from hunter gatherers and our domestication of animals play a role in this process? In Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller we about human evolution we learn that and much more.
The Great Escape
— by Angus Deaton
If you turn on the TV or read the news you quickly get the impression that the world is on the brink of disaster and that things have never been this bad. Angus Deaton’s “The Great Escape” paints a different picture. Despite the little COVID-19 blip, the world has never been better and over the last century millions of people have escaped poverty, and experienced improved living standards — largely thanks to enormous advances in global health.