John M. Barry

John M. Barry wrote The Great Influenza about the pandemic of 1918, and the book found a second readership in 2020 among people looking for a precedent. Its argument is that the medical catastrophe was shaped by the war: the American army moved infected men between camps at scale, and the federal government leaned on newspapers to protect morale, so the outbreak took the name of the one country that was not censoring its press. Barry sets the story inside the making of American scientific medicine, around William Welch and the Johns Hopkins men who built it. Rising Tide, his earlier book on the Mississippi flood of 1927, took the National Book Critics Circle award for general nonfiction. He has advised governments on pandemic planning and teaches at Tulane.