The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases That Jump from Animals to Humans.

The Chickens Fight Back is a thought-provoking book about how and why disease spreads between animals and humans. The author raises some excellent points, such as, how is the importance of a disease measured: by cases or deaths or disability-adjusted life years, or by the political-social status of its victims? He also helps the reader form a comprehensive view of the social, economic, political, and environmental interconnectedness of the world and the effect this can have from both a microscopic and macroscopic perspective. The book is full of information on animal-human diseases (zoonoses) and interesting personal and historic stories about their propagation. There is much to recommend this book.

However, Waltner-Toews also frequently digresses into minutiae that really have little bearing on the topic at hand. These meanderings sometimes make it difficult to follow the points that are being made. It was easy to become impatient when a paragraph was derailed from its point for the third time and it became difficult to remember what the original point had been. The language used is also not always accessible; the author moves between Latin terminology and English equivalents and does not always clarify their relationship. There also seems to be an assumption that the reader will have retained a certain level of familiarity with at least a high school biology class.

Witticisms and humour are sprinkled throughout, sometimes with great success and sometimes without (some of it will be offensive to some readers). The humour is entertaining, but it sometimes feels as if the author tries too hard.

The information contained in this book is interesting, and the overarching points—that we need to learn to live with disease and that all of our actions have unforeseen consequences—are excellent. It is a good book that could have been excellent with a little bit of work.