Germs by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, Simon &
Schuster, $27/£18.30, ISBN 0684871580
IT seemed pretty illogical at the time. On 11 September, a band of terrorists
hijacked airplanes and crashed them deliberately into buildings in the US,
killing thousands. A week later, Germs—a recent history of
biological weapons—sold out across the US. The astonished publisher had to
boost its print run from 15,000 to 100,000.
Why? If there was one thing the September atrocities showed us, it was that
terrorists don’t need fancy, high-tech weapons to kill. Certainly not germs,
which are tricky…
