American economist Herbert Simon once wrote that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Teaching biology to young people is complicated by the immense and complex world of biology itself. There seems to be an endless amount of information available to teach at any grain size we choose. Along with this comes the real risk of losing student attention in the explaining. One solution to this is telling stories. In its essence, Sandy Primrose’s book Microbiology of Infectious Disease is designed to “cut through the molecular information overload” and to “tell a story and get a sense of what the organism does and how it interacts with its environment” (p. v).
Most of the book contains sections devoted to telling stories about bacterial, eukaryotic, and viral pathogens. In each chapter, a thematic microbial story is told that includes historical context, the biology of the pathogen, and relevant molecular...