Spinney probably stole the elision from the 1985 Clint Eastwood movie of the same name. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” (True, the horse, not the rider, is the pale one. The title, though Spinney does not acknowledge it, comes from the Apostle John’s vision of the Fourth Horseman in Revelation 6:8. I read books like these partially for history knowledge and partially to understand what to do in a similar future situation, and Pale Rider is useful for both. It focuses on the only known pathogen likely to create a future pandemic, the influenza virus, through its greatest past outbreak, the Spanish Flu of 1918. This book, Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider, is a recent offering in the pandemic literature that has become popular in the past twenty years. Since I am an apocalypse monger, but a practical one, I do not worry about alien invasions or the reversal of Earth’s magnetic field, but I do worry about pandemics.
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