Way back before we’d ever heard of COVID-19, the TTBOOK staff sat around a big conference room table at our office at University of Wisconsin-Madison, brainstorming for hours about future shows. The idea of a show on viruses, contagions and pandemics came up, and I started following Sonia Shah, the author of the 2016 book “Pandemic.”
The show was put on a long list of future ideas, as it didn’t seem we needed to do it immediately. Then, of course, the past couple of years happened. We decided in July 2020 to do a show on migration, and I found Shah’s newest book “The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move” would give us a chance to talk with her about migration, with some unusual insight into how pandemics relate.
We re-air “Mysteries of Migration” this weekend, and it seems as timely as ever. You’ll hear sounds of animals in the Serengeti, visit sandhill cranes with Anne and Steve, and hear from Shah about the commonality of how animals, people and even, microbes, move.
–Shannon