Showing results by narrator "John Fox Bershof" in All Categories

To paraphrase the great sci-fi writer Stephen King: Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your heart, kill your darlings. Translation: stay on point and mercilessly avoid side stories and anecdotes. With much respect for Mr. King, The History of Man Series is precisely that, a great deal about all those little darlings, a style of writing termed “jumping off.”

The Second History of Man focuses mostly on bacteria and bacterial infections as the foundation, jumping off into Darwin and evolution, gin and tonics and the discovery of the first antibiotic to treat infection (and it wasn’t penicillin), and visiting with those clever chaps who cook up drugs in the lab. We’ll call upon poets and poetry, celebrities like Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack, and Bobby Darin, the classical music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the tragic story of World War II, Anne Frank and the Holocaust....

The Third History of Man leaves bacteria in the rear-view mirror and jumps to viruses and viral infections, the cold, the flu and COVID-19 (not just another flu!). We’ll cover epidemics, pandemics, and vaccines, the pox infections, and the Spock principle—that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one. From COVID and the rise of Zoom, we’ll venture into the rise of Homo sapiens and the fall of Neanderthals, the high sea adventures of Darwin, and the high sea adventures of dementia.

To paraphrase the great sci-fi writer Stephen King: Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your heart, kill your darlings. Translation: stay on point and mercilessly avoid side stories and anecdotes. With much respect for Mr. King, The History of Man Series is precisely that, a great deal about all those little darlings, a style of writing termed “jumping off.” The Sixth History of Man is the last narrative in the History of Man Series that uses infection as the underlying foundation. The series will continue but use other disease platforms for jumping off.