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Reading Plagues and Their Aftermath: How Societies Recover from Pandemics

A look at the long history of epidemics and pandemics provides an enthralling account of what we can expect of a post-COVID world

In a concise, authoritative, and gripping telling, Brian Michael Jenkins — one of our leading authorities on national security and an advisor to governments, presidents and CEOs — provides a masterly account of what kind of future the planet might be facing ... by looking at the world's long history of epidemics and discerning what was common about their aftermath.  
 
From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and this century's deadly SARS outbreak, plagues have been a much more relentless fact of life than many realize.
 
The legacy of epidemics, Jenkins observes, is not...