There is little doubt that the coming years will see a tsunami of books and journal special issues analyzing the global pandemic and its implications for every little corner of society. Major crises obviously call for scholarly reflection; however, crises can easily fool us into viewing the past merely as precursor to the current crisis. Prepandemic books on the World Health Organization (WHO) may appear outdated, but they are also happily unpretentious in not offering the definitive prequel to the COVID-19 pandemic. The two recent volumes by Wu and by Cueto, Brown, and Fee both benefit from this prepandemic bliss and add important chapters to the growing global health scholarship.
A core contribution of these works is to underline the unique worldview that characterized the first generation of WHO officials. Wu characterizes this worldview using Sheila Jasanoff's notion of dreamscapes (Jasanoff and Kim 2015). A dreamscape can be understood...
