To paraphrase the great sci-fi writer Stephen King: Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your heart, kill your darlings. Translation: stay on point and mercilessly avoid side stories and anecdotes. With much respect for Mr. King, The History of Man Series is precisely that, a great deal about all those little darlings, a style of writing termed “jumping off.”

The Sixth History of Man is the last narrative in the History of Man Series that uses infection as the underlying foundation. The series will continue but use other disease platforms for jumping off. From a human infection perspective, this sixth book will visit with the King of Pop Michael Jackson, vitiligo and propofol, the famous and infamous sexually transmitted diseases—herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, trichomonas, HIV and the granddaddy of colorful stories, syphilis—with their very entertaining tales, a world of romance, suspense, and thrillers. We’ll hop from science to art to music, going back in time to the astronomy of the Persians, Syrians, the Greek Aristotle and on to Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler. Our travels will take us to the Renaissance of art and music, stopping along a few stations, such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Monet. A discussion of why and how humans went from spoken language to written language is on our menu. We will pay homage with another visit with the First Viennese School, parse senility, delirium, and dementia and most assuredly discuss the women who helped build Johns Hopkins Hospital. OK Boomers! and the sociology of cohort generations will help complete this narrative.

The History of Man Series is written in a jumping off style, using medicine, disease, and health themes, fleeced of the normal jargon that all too often accompanies science narratives, as the foundation to jump off into history, world history, human history, American history, ancient history, biographies, celebrities and the rich and famous, the body, aging and longevity, science, biology and nature, physics, even some math thrown in, anatomy, a travel book of geology, geography, continents, Europe, Asia, Africa, America, South America, Australia, even the North Pole and South Pole, astronomy, the Universe and cosmos, war, politics, nature, art, music, romance, folklore, religion, the Bible, mythology, sports and athletes, weather, climate change and global warming, and maybe even some non-prescriptive self-help commentaries tossed in for good measure. For the print and eBook versions, comics interspersed to add some humor. And to add yet another twist to the writing style, another layer, each book showcases some personal anecdotes Dr. Bershof experienced during his life in medicine, a few biography sketches of suspense and thrillers that reveal a glimpse how the mind of a doctor works…or doesn’t work.

We’ll cherish all the darlings we encounter on our travels as they tell the tale of the humanity that remains eternal in all of us, in all its splendor and all its tragedy. All human activity and that of the Universe lies within our scope. Unlike Bryson’s wonderful book A Shorty History of Nearly Everything, a must -listen, this series makes no apologies for being a tome about nearly everything.