Thomas Levenson

Penguin Random House · 2026

In his latest book, Levenson searches for the origins of the most common arguments against vaccines: that they are unnatural; that they are more dangerous than the illnesses they claim to prevent; and that they are an affront to freedom. "A Pox on Fools" explores the human impulse to question and wonder, sometimes past the point at which the very act of questioning turns deadly.

Penguin Random House · 2025

For centuries, people in the West, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes. Nineteenth-century scientists finally made the connection. Life-saving methods to control infections and contain outbreaks soon followed. Next came the antibiotic era in the 1930s. Yet, less than a century later, the promise of that revolution is receding due to years of overuse. Is our self-confidence getting the better of us again?

Random House · 2020

Advances of the Scientific Revolution created newly abstract ideas about money, transforming it from something material - discs of precious metal - to a mathematical notion of money, shares, or bonds, or insurance that could evolve over time. Levenson shows how we are still vulnerable to the same risks that brought down Britain's first experiments with financial invention.