The Ghost Map (Steven Johnson)

I have mixed feelings about this read even though the premise of the book is a gripper--cholera is killing thousands of people in densely packed 19th century London--and John Snow tracks the disease to a source: a water pump that the residents are all using to collect water. Only no one believes him. Everyone--including the scientific community--says it has to do with "miasma," this theory that the stink of garbage and sewer infects people with disease. I would have preferred the author to draw the plot forward using John Snow, who is known today as the "Father of Epidemiology," how the events of that period unfolded with cholera itself as the heartless murderer, the femme fetale, and how Snow is stymied by the ignorance of the scientific community, who albeit in good faith sabotaged the health of the population with misdirected intentions. But Johnson doesn't do this. He goes round and round again, losing the plot line in a series of repetitions. And then in the end he keeps going, going into the this picture of how the city has become such a well-oiled, economically viable home to millions of people (where sewer, water, heat can be delivered to more people for less money than in the rural areas), tacking on a couple of chapters at the end of the book that lead the reader to envision the implications involved in the urban density of today. Only, he says the epidemic wouldn't be biological--like cholera or avian flu--necessarily, but technological. In the urban density possible today 25,000 people can be stacked in a building 110 stories high on a 1 acre of space. So, that unlike cholera, which spread comparatively slowly in a wider area, a terrorist attack of a space t his small would have an incredible magnitude and an effect which as we know was nearly instantaneous. And there is no cure either; nothing to stop the imminent deaths. So, when I closed this book I wondered if this book was about the cholera epidemic and how Snow's tracking system set the standard for a field--mapping out illness to locate a source. Or was it how science won out over the scientists. Or was this a story of how the city can grow to numbers unimaginable because of these ingenious systems we've devised to accommodate a mass of people in a relatively small area, numbers that can be easily decimated if the systems that were set up to accommodate the masses become inadvertently the very tools toward destruction. Or maybe it's all of these themes and stories combined, and that was just too much for me in a single book.