Wendy Orent on the Plague

Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease

Wendy Orent, New York: Free Press, 2004, reprinted 2013

I’ve been way for far too long. One of the reasons for the quiet is because I’ve been reading quite a few books this summer. This book was one of them. I wouldn’t normally review a nine-year old book, but it was just reprinted unrevised this year so I think it’s fair for review. Published in 2004 it can’t be expected to have hardly any of the recent genetic work.

Wendy Orent has a PhD in anthropology but has always worked as a freelance writer. Her journalistic history shows. The sensationalist title put me off reading this book for a long time. Unfortunately, it continued in the book. The material is attention-getting enough without adjectives like “chilling”. She also overused interviews as sources. Some of the interviews are interesting and provide opinions not found in print. In my opinion, interviews should not be used for material that has been published.

One of her primary sources is a Russian biologist named Igor Domaradskij whose Cold War career ran the gamut of roles in the Russian plague system from anti-plague epidemiologist to biological weapons designer. Orent previously was co-author of his autobiography and considers him a friend. Her theories and even terminology are heavily influenced by Domaradskij to the degree that it seems to compromise her objectivity. Sources like Domaradskij are difficult, divulging their version of events that their government will never acknowledge even occurred. We have to keep in mind that one reason men like Domaradskij write books is to get recognition for their secret work and get vengeance on a system they feel wronged by. Cold war Russian research was also warped by the influence of Lysenkoism and by its self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world of science making reconciliation of scientific theories and philosophies difficult. Even those like Domaradskij who say they always renounced Lysenkoism were still trained and worked in an environment that warped the scientific method.  We are forced to use their information because we can’t afford not to but we have to approach it with caution and skepticism.

Her reconstruction of the first two plague pandemics is a mixed bag. She supported Yersinia pestis as the agent of both pandemics and asserts that the human flea was the primary vector.  It’s interesting to see how she argues for the human flea as vector but she never really presents evidence to support this method. She also posits that there were fundamental differences between the first and second pandemics that I do not believe the sources support. We don’t have enough sources from the first pandemic to judge. She does not seem to recognize that although early plague records are primarily coastal, plague is mentioned in all areas of Europe that we have written records. It is likely that the perceived area restrictions are due more to our records than the actual spread of the plague. She makes some predictions about the evolution of Yersinia pestis, especially the Black Death clone(s), that have not panned out in modern genetic studies. Depending on Russian evolutionary theories rooted in Cold War philosophies is just not sound.  She argues for a major role for pneumonic plague early during the Black Death that transitions into a vector borne disease. These are just a few areas where she argues for explanations without enough scientific or historic evidence to back them up.

There is some thought-provoking material in this book primary on plague in the 20th century but there is a lot of chaff to sift to find the wheat. It may be useful to people who are well read on the plague literature, historic and scientific, but I can’t recommend it to those who have not done a lot of previous study on the plague.