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Apollo's Arrow

By: Nicholas A. Christakis MD PhD
Narrated by: Nicholas A. Christakis MD PhD
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Summary

A piercing and scientifically grounded look at the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic and how it will change the way we live - "excellent and timely." (The New Yorker)

Apollo's Arrow offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it swept through American society in 2020, and of how the recovery will unfold in the coming years. Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, best-selling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague - an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species.

Unleashing new divisions in our society as well as opportunities for cooperation, this 21st-century pandemic has upended our lives in ways that will test, but not vanquish, our already frayed collective culture. Featuring new, provocative arguments and vivid examples ranging across medicine, history, sociology, epidemiology, data science, and genetics, Apollo's Arrow envisions what happens when the great force of a deadly germ meets the enduring reality of our evolved social nature.

©2020 Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD (P)2020 Little, Brown & Company
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Critic reviews

"Apollo’s Arrow shoots straight and true to explain the scientific and social aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. Christakis’s background in biology, medicine, epidemiology, and sociology is a powerful formula for understanding this complex subject. I’m tempted to say that the gods created Christakis to write this book at this time. It is wise, vivid, and engaging." —William D. Nordhaus, author of The Climate Casino and 2018 Nobel Laureate in Economics

“Seldom have we been gifted with a study of pandemic disease marked by such scope, wit, and erudition. Still rarer is one that appears while the rest of us scramble to make sense of a rapidly evolving crisis, one shaped by the very social forces that Nicholas Christakis has studied for decades. Apollo’s Arrow is more than history’s first draft. It will live on as a journal of the plague years, certainly, and it inspires as it instructs. Definitive, engaging, and astonishing. A tour-de-force.” —Paul Farmer, professor, Harvard Medical School, founder, Partners in Health

“The world is ravenous for deep and accurate information about the most important event in the 21st century. No one is deeper than Nicholas Christakis, who ticks every box of expertise: medical, epidemiological, social, psychological, economic, historical. This is the place to go to understand the phenomenon that has turned the world, and our lives, upside down. Apollo’s Arrow is gripping, enlightening, and vitally important.” —Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now

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Superlative

Just fantastic. Huge sweep and range. Very well read by the author. Magisterial and wise.

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Good book

Provides a scientific view of the pandemic, along a historical perspective. Better to read than to hear, as I was struggling at some point to follow the numbers

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Covid-sploitation at it's worst.

Instead listen to pale rider and/or the somewhat dated the end of epidemics.

The author is definitive about vaccine priorities with a wonderfully flawed logic that ignores the most vulnerable and makes assumptions about vaccine that the manufacturers are telling us not to make. He is not an epidemiologist and this is clear from the certainty of his flawed logic on many issues. Still it might take a chunk out of his mortgage and I wish him well.

The book is very US-centric and if this pandemic had thought us anything it is to have a look at what the yanks and Brits are doing and to consider doing the opposite.

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2 people found this helpful