Outbreak!
The recommended new book, Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior is a massive tome, being a large format paperbound book (8" by 11"), with a total of 765 pages of about 340 entries. The authors are the scholars Hilary Evans, a social historian, and Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist and specialist in collective behavior. The editor-publisher Patrick Huyghe also deserves much credit for being the midwife at Anomalist Books for the birth of this big baby, during the Spring of 2009. From "Abdera Outbreak of Prose and Poetry" to "Zoot Suit Riots," the book takes the reader on an incredible tour of the topics at hand. The classics of contagion behavior are here, e.g. the "Band Bus Hysteria," "Cargo 'Cults'," "Copycat Behavior," "Phantom Slasher," "Pokemon Illness," "Salem Witch Hunts," "Suicide Clusters," and "Windshield Pitting Scare." But it may be t...