Cast as a biography of the typhus bacillus, Zinsser gives us an eyeful of the several thousand years of death and destruction that have been attendant to the development of this organism. He chronicles, moreover,  its transformations with a hopeful modern eye, attempting to show how modern conditions have ameliorated its ravages. One certainly hopes he is correct, and yet no where in the public arena do we hear discussion of human immune system sufficient to fulfill the promise of science circa 1935. It seems instead that our political leadership has promised safe spaces where neither nature nor history offers any such expectation.