This is a well-researched book. A VERY well researched book.

It’s also well written, and reads almost like a work of fiction, especially in the beginning.

There're loads of things I didn’t know, and much of it is immensely fascinating. It’s shocking to read what people honestly believed in those days, and more than once I found myself shaking my head and going, “No, guys, that’s not a good idea.”

Then, towards the end of Part Two, it just started getting a bit long in a tooth (if you’ve read the book, you might catch that pun), and more than a bit heavy. I think that “heaviness” is, at least in part, because it’s around that time in the book that the author strays from the “naked facts” and starts giving her own opinion. I don’t like it when authors and journalists do that — and it’s why I follow very few online news sources; there is far too much editorialising for my taste. When I read something like this, I want the facts, not the writer’s interpretation of the facts.

Of facts, though, there are plenty. There’s a massive acknowledgments section in the back of the book, and the Notes are well over a hundred pages long. The author cites every source, crosses every t, and dots every i. I also enjoyed the many, many photographs, which let me put faces to names and see almost first-hand the terrible progression of the disease.

Which also serves to drive home my point about the author’s own opinion: I can see for myself how bad things were. I don’t need the author to tell me how terrible SHE thought they were.

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