This makes the narrative flow more easily and keeps listeners engaged.” She is especially effective at capturing the author’s use of irony and occasional expressions of incredulity. “It would be all too easy to read this book about devastating diseases with a basso profundo voice of doom…Instead, narrator Gabra Zackman follows the author’s lead and takes a lighter tone. “Wright brings a reliably sane and bitingly funny voice to a topic we never realized we wanted to know so much about: historically devastating plagues!” “Leadership, religiosity, power structures, and science collide…Withith Wright’s signature humorous tone, this is a grim but engaging look at some of humanity’s most feared foes.” With her signature mix of in-depth research and storytelling, and not a little dark humor, Jennifer Wright explores history’s most gripping and deadly outbreaks, and ultimately looks at the surprising ways they’ve shaped history and humanity for almost as long as anyone can remember. Get Well Soon delivers the gruesome, morbid details of some of the worst plagues we’ve suffered as a species, as well as stories of the heroic figures who selflessly fought to ease the suffering of their fellow man. Some of their responses to those outbreaks are almost too strange to believe in hindsight. Throughout time, humans have been terrified and fascinated by the diseases history and circumstance have dropped on them.

And in turn-of-the-century New York, an Irish cook caused two lethal outbreaks of typhoid fever, a case that transformed her into the notorious Typhoid Mary. In late-nineteenth-century England an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club in his gracious townhome―a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure.

In a month more than 400 people had been stricken by the mysterious dancing plague. She danced until she was carried away six days later, and soon thirty-four more villagers joined her.

In 1518, in a small town in Alsace, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn’t stop. A witty, irreverent tour of history’s worst plagues―from the Antonine Plague, to leprosy, to polio―and a celebration of the heroes who fought them

Get Well Soon by Jennifer Wright