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The New York Public Library is proud to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. This prestigious award is given annually to journalists whose books have brought clarity and public attention to important issues, events, or policies. 

We're interviewing the five finalists for the Bernstein Award on our podcast over the next two months. Today’s episode features the first of those interviews, with Sonia Shah. Her book is called Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond.

Emily Pullen, Bernstein library review committee member, describes the book this way:

Shah takes a historical event, the cholera outbreak of the early 19th century, and breaks it down into factors that lead to its spread. These become chapters: locomotion, filth, crowds, corruption, blame, cure. Within each chapter, she details the history of cholera, then she jumps to more recent epidemics of the modern era (AIDS, SARS, Ebola, cholera again), and finally she looks at what lessons can be learned about preventing the next big pandemic of the future.

Author Bio

Sonia Shah is an award-winning science journalist and the author of 4 books.  Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and on CNN, Fresh Air, RadioLab, and the TED stage. Her latest book, Pandemic, was published by Sarah Crichton Books/FSG in 2016.

Critical Reviews

“Ms Shah has chosen a complex structure for this book…but the strategy pays off; she has succeeded in producing a lively, rigorously researched and highly informative read.” ―The Wall Street Journal

“Shah proves a disquieting Virgil, guiding us through the hells ruled by [infectious diseases] . . . the power of Shah's account lies in her ability to track simultaneously the multiple dimensions of the public-health crises we are facing.” ―The Chicago Tribune

The ingredients for pandemics remain potent in a jet age with deforested lands, ever growing cities, the consumption of bush meat and other exotic wild cuisine (from illegal “wet markets”), antibiotic resistance, inadequate disease surveillance, and destructive cultural attitudes, ranging from abject fear to blame to indifference. Shah covers all of these aspects in vivid prose and through revealing eyewitness accounts. This is not fun reading, but it’s necessary—one can only hope that it drives more effective surveillance and rapid response to tomorrow’s plagues.” — Kirkus Reviews

Dive Deeper

• In her conversation with the NYPL’s Aidan Flax-Clark, Shah emphasizes that fighting and avoiding pandemics in the future will require a more holistic approach, rather  than simply a biomedical one. The contributing factors today include climate change, public health measures, the destruction of wildlife habitats, foreclosures and the housing crisis, and funding sources of the World Health Organization. Listen to the podcast above for their full conversation.

• For more details on policy implications, here is an interview with Sonia Shah and Ashley Chappo of the World Policy Journal.

• One of the big culprits responsible for New York City’s dirty water, and hence the spread of cholera in the early 1800s, was The Manhattan Company, a private water company and bank founded by none other than Aaron Burr. Here are a few images of The Manhattan Company from the NYPL’s archives.

• New York’s water quality vastly improved with the introduction of the Croton Distributing Reservoir, which was  located where the NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building now sits. You can even see some of the original reservoir foundation in the NYPL’s South Court.

• Shah’s TED Talk, “3 Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria,” has been viewed more than a million times. 

The 2017 winner will be announced on May 22. Check out more of our #Bernstein30 coverage, find a complete list of prior winners, and learn more about the process on the official site.

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Emily Pullen is a member of the 2016 committee of librarians that selects the five finalists for the Bernstein Award. Pullen is the Retail Initiatives Associate in the NYPL Shop.

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