In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have opened their pocketbooks in hopes of eradicating the scourge. How does a parasitic disease that we've known how to prevent for more than a century still infect three hundred million people every year, killing nearly one million of them? In The Fever, the journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer this question, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives. The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, devastating history of this long-standing thorn in the side of humanity.

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names—and opened their pocketbooks—in hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren't we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we've known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly 1 million of them?

In The Fever, the journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer these questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives. Through the centuries, she finds, we've invested our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, and invariably those hopes have been dashed. From the settling of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wars and the advances of the Industrial Revolution, Shah tracks malaria's jagged ascent and the tragedies in its wake, revealing a parasite every bit as persistent as the insects that carry it. With distinguished prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, devastating history of this long-standing thorn in the side of humanity.

“Riveting. [Crude] is an informative, startling, and necessary book.”—Roy Morrison, author of Ecological Democracy

Crude is the unexpurgated story of oil, from the circumstances of its birth millions of years ago to the spectacle of its rise as the indispensable ingredient of modern life. In addition to fueling our SUVs and illuminating our cities, crude oil and its byproducts fertilize our produce, pave our roads, and make plastic possible. “Newborn babies,” observes author Sonia Shah, “slide from their mothers into petro-plastic-gloved hands, are swaddled in petro-polyester blankets, and are hurried off to be warmed by oil-burning heaters.” The modern world is drenched in oil; Crude tells how it came to be. A great human drama emerges, of discovery and innovation, risk, the promise of riches and the power of greed.

From the beginning, crude oil has inspired awe and sparked violence. In the early days of this fascinating saga of man and mineral, the mysterious sap was used to tell the future (from the shapes drops made in water) and to fight wars (as liquid fire flung at the enemy). Author Shah infuses recent chapters of the story with equal drama, through chronicles of colorful modern-day characters—from the hundreds of Nigerian women who stormed a Chevron plant, to a monomaniacal scientist for whom life is the pursuit of this earthblood and its elusive secret.

From the billions of microscopic plankton collecting on the ancient ocean floor to the occupation of Iraq, Shah moves masterfully between scientific, economic, political and social analysis. Crude captures the many sides of the indispensable mineral we someday may have to find a way to live without.

Sonia Shah is the editor of the critically acclaimed Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire and Between Fear and Hope: A Decade of Peace Activism. She is a former editor at South End Press and Nuclear Times magazine.