The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism
About this book
In this substantially expanded edition of his earlier book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis looks at the COVID-19 pandemic now sweeping the world. He sets the current crisis in the context of previous viral catastrophes, notably the 1918 influenza disaster that killed at least forty million people in three months and the Avian flu of a decade and a half ago that sounded a tocsin, disastrously ignored by those in power, for today’s devastating outbreak.In language both accessible and authoritative that, in a signature of Davis’ oeuvre, draws on a wide range of disciplines, The Monster Enters surveys the scientific and political roots of today’s viral apocalypse. In doing so it exposes the key roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments and a capitalist global system careening out of control, in creating the ecological pre-conditions for a plague that has brought much of human existence to a juddering halt.“Dizzying … In Mr. Davis's account, the world ends in fire, and the next time is now.”—The New York Times (on Davis’ Ecology of Fear)“Mike Davis’s The Monster at our Door...gives me everything that the news cycle doesn’t: a sense of the interconnected forces and the history that set us up for what we’re experiencing.”—novelist Molly Dektar in Vogue