The book is an entertaining, very informative, and timely (think Avian flu) work which was obviously well-researched by the author. The horrors of the 1918 influenza outbreak have been long forgotten by most due to the passage of time and the inevitable attrition of age. This book certainly reminds the reader that the people of yesterday lived through events and circumstances that rival our troubles today. The work is also extremely educational in the sense that one gets a wealth of background information about medicine, research, epidemiology as well as life (and death) in the early 1900's.