BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2020
Gareth Williams
Two books that resonated with me this year cover different eras in the 200- year campaign to defeat smallpox, one of humanity’s greatest scourges. Michael Bennett’s War Against Smallpox (CUP) explains how vaccination conquered the world in the quarter-century after Edward Jenner introduced it in the 1790s. It’s an incredible journey, with walk-on parts for Napoleon, Jefferson and the tsar of Russia.
Gavin Weightman’s The Great Inoculator (Yale) looks at variolation, the bizarre 18th-century precursor of vaccination. Patients were deliberately infected with smallpox (not the harmless cowpox used in vaccination), hoping to confer protection against future attacks. Amazingly, it worked, notably in the hands of Daniel Sutton, a non-medical entrepreneur, who marketed his secret method as “safe, quick and pleasant” and apparently variolated more than 10,000 people without a single death from smallpox. He built up a huge franchise but later lost out to plagiarists and ultimately vaccination. His story isn’t “untold”, but Weightman relates it with clarity and verve.
For my last choice I want to jump to 1949 when, without warning, the USSR exploded an atomic bomb. Behind the leaking of atomic secrets to the Soviets was Ursula Kuczynski, a pro-communist German Jew known to her English neighbours as “Mrs Burton” and as “Sonya” to her Red Army bosses. As related by Ben Macintyre in Agent Sonya (Viking), her espionage career took her to China, Poland, Germany and England.
The cover blurb claims her story “has never been told”. In fact, a translation of Kuczynski’s autobiography appeared in 1991, but, as expected, Macintyre makes this a riveting and thought-provoking read.
Gareth Williams’ most recent book is Unravelling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019)