Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History
By: Dorothy H. Crawford / Narrated By: Jennifer M. Dixon
Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
Taken in by the cover; bored to death by the text
I’m gonna have to admit it: Around 1/3 of the way in I, yes, went over to Audible to check out what other reviewers said…. I KNOW! I NEVER do that.
But I was kinda sorta at wit’s end, zoning out all over the place, and comPLETEly unengaged. And when I saw a reviewer said that Get Well Soon had 80% same material but was better, I sorta breathed a sigh of relief as THAT book was also going to be listened to for this Pandemic Week of Listening. Still, I think going to check reviews out in mid-Listen did Deadly Companions a bit of a disservice.
Besides which, it’s just plain rude…
But ANYway—it’s like this, see? When the audiobook came out in 2018, I saw the cover and knew I HAD to get the danged thing. I mean, like, I have the creepiest nightmares re: doctors in those long robes, the beak noses, the glass eyes, the gloves, the staffs. If you’re ailing mightily and you look up and see one of those coming at you? Totally mind-blowing! If a microbe isn’t killing you, the heart attack upon seeing one of those kinda guys most certainly will. So I s’pose I was kinda thinking the audiobook would be a down and dirty look at times of sickness, death, fear, and chaos.
Uhm, nooooo….
Rather, it’s a totally scientific and rather clinical look at history with some hypothesizing and educating about earlier times whenst we were Hunter Gatherers, then when things became all Agrarian. Yes, author Dorothy H. Crawford knows her stuff, definitely, it’s just she reels it off without much other information to jazz it up, make it emotionally evocative, lure us into feeling SOMEthing besides a simple sense of science throughout history. Narrator Jennifer M. Dixon doesn’t help much, as she adds neither enthusiasm nor warmth to the performance, plus I had to jack my x1.3 listening speed up to around x1.8 to get any inflection outta the reading. To say it plods along at slower speeds is a gross understatement.
There’s plenty here that SHOULD be interesting, as I said: Crawford is quite the intellectual expert, in no way dumbs the information down for her audience. But, and I’ve said this before, I experience audiobooks rather than remember them, hence am I able to be excited after the third, fourth, fifth Listens, always getting something new from the book. Turns out, that was a problem this time as I came out of the first listen kinda punchy and zoned out, having not experienced which was actually a LOT (Ms. Crawford defines Microbe as ANYthing microscopic—viruses, bacteria, etc. etc. so there were plenty of ailments covered).
So I gritted my teeth and listened a second time, and totally zoned out again. Considering we’re all currently in the midst of a terrible pandemic, and I shoulda been seeing parallels left and right, I still wound up coming out feeling bored and unmoved.
Lemme be fair to the book and offer that if you’re NOT into the human side of disease, if you’re into more scholarly treatises, this book might be right up your alley. It’s an intelligent look at how things have evolved over large spans of time; it’s written by a supremely confident writer. You won’t be talked down to, and you won’t get bogged down in all sorts of icky stuff like human emotions and such all.
It’s just that I happen to be one of those people who liiiiiiikes feeling a tie to history, and I dearly applaud it when a person of scientific expertise excites and engages me, especially if it further moves me to study even more about the subject matter.
Nope. When all was said (At x1.8 speed) and done, I didn’t feel moved to study more so much as feel relieved that I miiiiight be getting into a better audiobook further on in the Week’s Listening. And when THAT book was finished?
They were right: Get Get Well Soon instead…
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