Book Review-"The Anthrax Letters" By Leonard A. Cole

Book Review- “The Anthrax Letters” by Leonard A. Cole

This paper reviews the book “The Anthrax Letters” which was authored by Leonard A. Cole. The book was published on 10/1/2003 by National Academies Press in Washington. This book has a total of 280 pages. The book carefully draws the chronology of the anthrax episodes that occurred in September 2001. They came and then went during an overwhelming time frame that it is explicable to keep in mind the anthrax-bearing letters as a dreadful dream. However, five individuals passed on from them, and this tight account of the occasions makes it pass that they were a mortal machine gear-piece in the wheel that prompted Homeland Security, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Cole, an expert in bioterrorism additionally makes it apparent that the letters' frightful cargo may effortlessly have guaranteed numerous more lives if health experts had not acted with excellent instinct and dispatch, meeting the challenge at hand like recent day Minutemen. Anthrax' notoriety goes before it: a scriptural maladie, a hyper-intensifying bacterium that can bloom from a group of spores littler than the eye of a burrowing little creature into a grim blood ooze that executes or kills its victims. The author draws striking representations of the microbes, the individuals who were contaminated, and those whose employment it was to counter the danger and set up the country for natural attack. He depicts the inadequate and speculative data specialists needed to work from, the trouble of analysis, and the vital parts played by the Centers for Disease Control, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. To give the story more prominent extension, Cole additionally touches upon the smallpox destruction battle, the battle against natural weapons, the developing first line of safeguard against compound and organic assault, and the sorry history of Anthrax lies over the past decade. Despite the great control works of health experts, an unsettling story of very available weapons.

The book is relevant to the readers as it addresses the subject of bioterrorism which is the main topic of discussion in "The Anthrax Letters." It is entirely riveting. Since by mere reading of the prologue will make one to actually read the book. Cole is a outstanding writer. The story presented in this book is a true mystery that explores behind the dread of the 2001 anthrax attack. Cole assumed his own, open-minded investigation, and carried out interviews with all the surviving victims whose accounts have been kept out of the news up to now. There are as well enthralling representations of the doctors, researchers, as well as scientists who were working behind the scenes in the middle of the storm of events.

This book is intended for the readers who are genuinely keen on the "Anthrax letter" occurrences, as it presents an intriguing and truly significant reading. The humanity of the people who contracted anthrax is successfully brought home and what they felt and how they and everyone around them responded are enlighteningly portrayed, for the most part from pages 46 to 105. Pages 157 to 168 depict the repulsive and very nearly mind-boggling encounters of the casualties of prior anthrax lies because of insufficiently educated and dishonorably prepared HAZMAT responders in basically clumsy reaction situations. The "whodunnit" section covers the scope of perspectives on this subject viably.

Mr. Cole's new study is a standout amongst the most legitimate of the late product of books on the anthrax letters, and it is helped by the writer's unfailingly clear written work style, which makes the natural danger of anthrax straightforward. The story Mr. Cole weaves is obviously captivating. Keeping in mind it can now and again convey all the dramatization of a current thriller, the 280-page book additionally offers the most finish look accessible at the still-unsolved puzzle of how and why 22 individuals got to be tainted with anthrax between October 4th and November 21, 2001.

Books of this sort are not likely to be literary classics; they are composed in scramble with a perspective to getting the business sector before that famously whimsical element, "public interest", changes to the following subject of apprehension, concern, or tension. In this way, despite the fact that their exploration into the topic by and large cannot be blamed, they do appear to impart a comparative absence of that scholarly and publication data of time and exertion which, in a really elegantly composed book, brings about a decent story. Three things specifically strike this commentator about these books. The principal is an equality of style; in the event that you read three or four of them in the meantime, or in close progression, they just converge into one in your psyche. The second is the constant inability to filter out what is really important to the focal story; the writers seem to feel that each truth recorded while inquiring about for the book and the name and depiction of each individual talked with or alluded to must be incorporated. The third is the battle by the creators to clarify the foundation science; regularly it appears they are truly attempting to disclose it to themselves. The outcome is that the point of interest is repetitive, deficient or mistaken for readers with pertinent experimental learning yet excessively perplexing for the layman.

Leonard Cole's book is no special case in these regards. The storyline is hindered all through with endless anecdotal, recorded or exploratory deviations and clarifications making it regularly diligent work to read. Unlimited quantities of characters go back and forth all through the book. As the majority of them show up on the stage, one is dealt with to such data as the shading of their hair, what they were wearing at the time of meeting, little activities they performed, for example, purchasing a container of water, or where they were taught, basically contributing nothing to the genuine matter under control. Then again, maybe a couple people get whole parts dedicated to them. Part 6, for instance, is committed to Dr D.A. Henderson, of smallpox annihilation distinction, and at any rate a large portion of the section, but an extremely fascinating half, is about his adventures in this appreciation. The general result is that the book is too long and wandering and the focal subject loses sway. An ordered synopsis of the occasions key to the book would have been such a help; it was just about difficult to stay informed regarding the request of occasions and occupying attempting to do as such.

For the majority of the 22 casualties of the anthrax letters, Cole gives far reaching detail on the circumstances encompassing their contamination, judgment, treatment and an inevitable recuperation or sad passing. As a specialist in bioterrorism, Cole is getting it done portraying the doctors' starting suspicion of anthrax disease, and the ensuing arousing of the gigantic national reaction system at the neighborhood, state and government level. Cole gives an entrancing record of how rapidly the symptomatic actualities of therapeutic science got to be national sentiments of fear.

References

Cole, L. A. (2003). The anthrax letters: A medical detective story. Washington, D.C: Joseph

Henry Press.