This was a good 100 page book padded by a lot of loosely connected materials that may – or may not – have had anything to do with rabies. Sure, vampires, werewolves, and zombies might draw some of their inspiration from rabies… but just because Dracula is fond of wolves and can turn into a bat doesn’t necessarily make him a rabies vector. I think this level of pop culture review (“cultural history”) is fine in the proper doses… but too much of this book wandered around descriptions of books that had rabies in them or stories and myths that merely had dogs in them (and Cujo was only mentioned once and that, I suspect, was one of the more “important” examples of rabies in pop culture of the recent past… you’d think that’d get a more thorough analysis). Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes a dog is just a dog.

The chapters on the search for a vaccine, Bali, and NYC’s rabies outbreak were pretty interesting and are what this book needed to be more about. I think it ultimately took too much of a focus on popularizing science by taking large doses of science out of it. There’s a balancing act for the lay person (which I am) and this one didn’t get it right.