SO VERY SMALL

It is an urgent and timely history, just as that astonishing progress now recedes as germs evolve, and as we are reminded of our fragility in the very small adjacent world of viruses, whose understanding has flowed from the long and arduous work done to uncover and discover germ theory. 

The story Levenson weaves here is epic, spanning centuries and places and revolutionary personalities. From the Netherlands to Bengal, from Calcutta to Hamburg, from pioneering work in enlightenment Italy to pioneering destruction in Civil War America; from Semmelweis to Snow to Koch, Pasteur, and Fleming, with cameos by the likes of Aristotle, Lincoln, and Churchill for good measure - SO VERY SMALL is an immersive intellectual history and scientific quest (with a gripping undercurrent of ghoulish brutality) which will delight readers of Mukherjee, Steven Johnson, and Winchester, among others - not to mention the growing readership of Tom Levenson himself.

This book is of the moment but not consumed by it (nor too directly related), and it is a work that will stand the test of time and become a perennial go-to for the inevitable waves of disease and public health crises that ebb and flow in the years to come.

Thomas Levenson is a professor of science writing at MIT. He is the author of several books, including The Hunt for Vulcan, Einstein in Berlin, and Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist. He has also made ten feature-length documentaries (including a two-hour Nova program on Einstein) for which he has won numerous awards.