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Review title: How can you write about the past without knowing the present
Product review: If you would write a book about economics would you visit your local bank manager to get all the background information? Would you think that it is sufficient to read your way through some archives? Probably not.But this is what Rocco does to malaria. Rocco visits her childhood doctor in Kenya and spends a lot of time in archives to write about quinine. This may well be the safest and perhaps also the most comfortable approach to find the material for a book. And it could work for any subject, pianos in Berlin or cheese in Italy. Unfortunately what emerges is not a contemporary picture of the treatment of malaria or the history of malaria treatment but a rather skewed view on a historic niche. How can you try to understand the past if you don't know the present? If you care about some historical particularities, which pope had what malaria problem, written in beautiful English this is your book.
