In The Company of Men: The Ebola Tales

Great story telling, a good balance of facts and fiction. We hear from a doctor, a nurse, a mother, a young volunteer and a tree, yes a tree. All points of views covered.This was a very informative and enjoyable read for me, yes it was sad but there was a lot of hope in it as well. There was love and pain, facts and fiction.I think everyone should pick this up. Doctors, nurses and other medical people will find a lot of relatable things in it especially those that have ever practiced in Nigeria or any other African country.

⭐⭐⭐.5"Her fellow students had heard the rumours circulating in the neighbourhood: the medical staff was behind all these deaths; the President of the Republic had supposedly paid them large sums of money to reduce the local population and thus get rid of the poor. Ebola, they said, didn't exist."I've never read a story written from the point of view of a tree before... or the point of view of a virus... Very bizarre but also quite enlightening?I'm not someone who reads books for education, as I'm sure I've said many times previously; that's what my course textbooks are for. But there is something about Biology which has always fascinated me (and is probably why I study it) so when I received the tour invite for this, a book about Ebola, I had to sign up. And in the nicest way possible, I really enjoyed the stories about that epidemic, especially the medical memoirs. Although I believe this was all a work of fiction and 'based on' events.A great collection of tales and a super short book that you can easily devour in a couple of hours

This is not a novel, and yet neither is it a work of pure non-fiction. Instead it’s a fable, a collection of snapshots from various viewpoints to lay bare the devastating impact of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.Two young boys wander from their village to hunt in an ancient nearby forest. Their aim is tragically true and the bats they kill are cooked over an open fire back in the village. Shortly afterwards, the Ebola virus rampages through Western Africa, infecting and killing many people over the next few years, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.The author portrays the story of the epidemic through a series of moving vignettes, some told by humans, some by natural characters, including the deadly virus itself, all combining to give a chilling voice to the disaster.A doctor, dealing with disease and death every day, wondering when he’ll see his family again; a nurse, whose own daughter is ignored and isolated at school; a student volunteering as a gravedigger, not for money but out of love for his country; a mother, wanting only to die at home, with ‘the pain binding me to my children like an umbilical cord‘; a rare survivor, shunned by family and community, who tries to give hope to others struck down; and the engaged couple, one testing positive, one negative, one living, one dying: ‘I fear death, but not so much for myself. I’m more afraid of losing the one I love. The one who gave me back my will to live.‘Book-ending these very human stories we hear from the ancient Baobab tree in the forest, and – most chillingly – from the deadly virus:‘I’m a virus thousands of years old. I belong to the large family of the Filoviridae. People have known about me for only forty years or so. Nevertheless, I’ve been around for a very long time in this extraordinary forest, referred to as “primeval”, where everything has remained pristine since the beginning of time.’‘It’s not me that has changed. It’s humankind which has changed direction. The lives men lead today are no longer the lives the Old Ones led. They’ve become more demanding, greedier, more predatory. Their appetites are limitless.’The book only has 123 pages but packs a mighty emotional punch, and clearly has some resonance with the global Coronavirus pandemic we are fighting today. The original French text – the author was born in France and brought up in the Ivory Coast – was written in 2017, but as Véronique observes when asked if she has re-evaluated the book in the light of COVID-19:‘In 2017 there was no idea about COVID-19, so in this sense the two situations are not comparable.However, there are striking similarities: the isolation and the loneliness that the pandemic brings; the tearing apart of family ties; the scars that it is leaving on the vulnerable; the issue of trust in government; the violence and resistance at times; the heavy burden on the medical profession; the economic crisis.’