the author

LAURIE GARRETT

Senior Fellow for Global Health

Council on Foreign Relations

Author, Lecturer, Policy Analyst

 

Laurie Garrett wrote her first bestselling book, THE COMING PLAGUE: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, while splitting her time between the Harvard School of Public Health and the New York newspaper, Newsday. In the 1992-93 academic years Garrett was a Fellow at Harvard, where she worked closely with the emerging diseases group, a collection of faculty concerned about the surge in epidemics of previously unknown or rare viruses and bacteria. The book was published in hardcopy by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 1994, and spent19 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Released in paperback in 1995 by Viking Penguin, THE COMING PLAGUE remains in print and continues to sell vigorously. The book will be released in e-book form in May 2011.

During the 1990s Garrett continued tracking outbreaks and epidemics worldwide, noting the insufficient responses from global public health institutions in Zaire, India, Russia and most of the former USSR, Eastern Europe, and the United States. This resulted in publication in 2000 of BETRAYAL OF TRUST: The Collapse of Global Public Health, released by Hyperion that year, and in paperback in 2001. BETRAYAL OF TRUST was also a vigorous seller, and remains in print today. It will also be released as an e-book in May 2011.

In Summer 2011 , Garrett’s long-awaited third book, I HEARD THE SIRENS SCREAM: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks, was published in time for the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 by Amazon as an e-book. Representing more than seven years of research and writing, SIRENS SCREAM provides perspectives and insights never previously compiled. It details the roles al-Qaeda operatives played in the attacks of September 11, 2001 and may have played in the anthrax mailings that followed.  The actions of local responders – police, fire, public health, medical, FBI, and others – in response to the attacks and the unfolding anthrax nightmare are detailed. The book answers questions such as:

  • What was in the air that New Yorkers breathed for three months as the collapsed World Trade Center burned in a two thousand degree cauldron?
  • What caused World Trade Center Cough?
  • Was Bruce Ivins the anthrax culprit, as the FBI claims?
  • What happened to the economy, jobs, and politics of New York City as a result of the 9/11 and anthrax attacks of 2001?
  • Who created the myth that the anthrax was made in Iraq, and why?
  • What did the Yankees baseball team have to do with New York’s recovery?
  • Where did the political leaders of Capitol Hill go after the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11?
  • Why did the attacks spark billions of dollars-worth of smallpox vaccination efforts?
  • Are Americans safer today than they were in 2001?