Beth Skwarecki: Outbreak!

Advance copy: Backstories on books by NASW members

Cover: Outbreak!

OUTBREAK!:
50 TALES OF EPIDEMICS THAT TERRORIZED THE WORLD
Beth Skwarecki
Adams Media, October 1, 2016, $15.99
ISBN-10: 1440596271; ISBN-13: 978-1440596278

Skwarecki reports:

The idea for this book started at Adams Media. My editor found me (shout-out to Atif at Public Health Perspectives, who made the connection), and then gave me the title and the structure: fifty 1000-word vignettes, each covering a specific pandemic. I suggested tweaking that to epidemics, and suddenly the time and place of each could get much more specific. An outbreak could now earn a place in my table of contents not by being large, but by being interesting.

Beth Skwarecki

I ended up with a manuscript that covers a huge variety of diseases: plenty of pandemic staples like plague and cholera and flu, but also quirkier illnesses like scurvy and anthrax and Ebola. The timeline stretches from prehistory to 2014. It includes a handful of legends and controversies as well. What caused the plague of Athens, or the English sweating sickness? Was the “fiery serpent” of the old testament really a parable about Guinea worm?

My biggest regret is that I couldn't include as much diversity as I'd like. Most of the medical history I found was centered around white male doctors and scientists in Europe or the U.S. I did trace stories back to non-Western sources where I could: instead of discussing smallpox in the context of Jenner's cowpox vaccine or even Mary Wortley Montagu's trip to the Ottoman empire, for example, I focused a chapter around the birth of immunization in China, centuries before Westerners embraced the idea.

Outbreak was a fun whirlwind of library research. I had just a few months to put the book together, and I spent it ordering loans through my local library system, and looking up digitized versions of primary sources. (It's amazing what you can find on Google Books!) This routine differed from my usual workflow of web articles and phone interviews, but I also got to dig much deeper into history than I ever had before.

Contact info:

Author: Beth Skwarecki, 412-465-0462, beth@bethskw.com
Publicist: Bethany Carland-Adams, 508-205-1607, bethany.carland-adams@fwcommunity.com
Book website: http://www.adamsmediastore.com/outbreak

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Advance Copy

The path from idea to book may take myriad routes. The Advance Copy column, started in 2000 by NASW volunteer book editor Lynne Lamberg, features NASW authors telling the stories behind their books. Authors are asked to report how they got their idea, honed it into a proposal, found an agent and a publisher, funded and conducted their research, and organized their writing process. They also are asked to share what they wish they’d known when they started or would do differently next time, and what advice they can offer aspiring authors. Lamberg edits the authors’ answers to produce the Advance Copy reports.

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