Books-in-Brief – Books-in-Brief – Books-in-Brief

While the memory and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to haunt humanity, Julia Hauser’s and Sarnath Banerjee’s The Moral Contagion reminds us that this is not a singular or isolated experience but one that has been shared by generations of humans since times immemorial. Taking us diachronically across various centuries and geographies, Hauser traces an engrossing, and perhaps lesser known, history of pandemic or plague outbreaks and the many important social, political, and moral restructurings that were brought by them. TheMoral Contagion however deviates from conventional modes of history writing, which are often detail-oriented and statistically heavy, by adopting a refreshingly graphic mode of storytelling that combines Julia Hauser’s simple yet scholastic prose style with Sarnath Banerjee’s captivating illustrations chapter after chapter.