I really liked reading "Deadly companions", it was one of the first books I read about microbes and viruses and I learned a lot. The author makes a great work at explaining what we know and don't know about the history of viruses with many anecdotes, and look both at the past and challenges in the future. The only drawback I see is that doing a book that is going through history, it gets a bit disorganized when many diseases are coming back in history, and quickly get into a mix of historical and per disease narrative. It should also be noted that the book was published in 2007 and lack some recent knowledge (like of course Covid but also recent knowledge about Ebola). Still a really good book, highly recommend it!