Financial Times

I had missed this review of Ghost Map from a few weeks back in the Financial Times. I love the opening:

I wonder how Steven Johnson pitched this book to his agent. Maybe he said something like this: "I want to describe how the cause of cholera was discovered in London in 1854 and how it made possible the enormous cities of today. I plan to write a lot about excrement, sewers and how horrible it is to die as your body suddenly expels litres of water and waste." Mmmm, nice. You need a strong digestion to get through the resulting book, The Ghost Map. If your stomach is up to it, your brain will benefit. The story of how John Snow, a London physician, proved that cholera came from drinking infected water, not from breathing noxious air, has been told repeatedly, but never with such intellectual dexterity and, despite the topic, so engagingly.

A number of people have made similar remarks about the topic itself being initially very repulsive. It's always meant in a flattering way: this guy actually makes cholera into a great airplane read. And so I'd love to be able to say that I took on a deliberately challenging topic and in spite of everything managed to turn it into a page turner. But the truth is from the beginning I thought of this material as distinctly commercial. Books about disease have historically done very well -- think Hot Zone or Influenza or even, in part, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It was really only when I started doing more of the research in London and realized how central human excrement was going to be to the story that I began to wonder if people were going to be grossed out in a bad way. It was right around then that On Bullshit had become a surprise bestseller, and so I joking said to my editor one day that perhaps we should call it On Shit.

Comments

[LESLIE JOHN VAIZEY]

Having read Steven Johnson's book : The Ghost Map, and being worried by some of the Homeopathic comments that we find on the Web, refering to the success of homeopathic remedies curing cholera, I would like to knoiw what Steven thinks about the subject.
Best regards

Leslie

[LESLIE JOHN VAIZEY]

I thoroughly enjoyed Steven's book "Ghost Map", but I would really like to know what he thinks about the Homeopathic claims that their " system" cured people with cholea during the outbreak in London in 1854 ?
They claim that their results were far more sucessful in obtaining cures than traditional methods?
Any chance I might get a reply ?