Pictured is Emily St. John Mandel, author of a bestselling novel, Station Eleven. I read this book on my recent trip to Europe, and I do have to agree with the various (and many) laudatory comments found on the cover of the book (and also within). It's recommended! Here is a link to a nice review from Greenwich Time.
The premise of the book is that an amazingly powerful flu sweeps the world, with this pandemic killing over 99% of the entire population of Planet Earth within about two weeks. Here's one observation, found on Page 178 of the Vintage paperback edition that I read:
On silent afternoons in his brother's apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.
We live, in other words, in a "human" world, and we are "all in this together." These are two of the themes that I promote, relentlessly, here on my Two Worlds blog, so you can see how I'd like the book. Good premises, and a great story, too!
If things are looking up, by the end, it's at least partly thanks to the fact that one of the main characters establishes a Museum of Civilization at a former airport near Detroit. History matters! Libraries and books matter!
They do!
They do!
Let me repeat: recommended!
Image Credit:
http://thoughtcatalog.com/porter-anderson/2014/08/who-says-book-marketing-is-dead-picador-champions-station-eleven/
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