Spin doctors are seldom out of the news for long. But who really knows what spin is, or what spin doctors do? Paul Richards shows that spin doctoring is a new phrase to describe a very old practice.

Three young people financed by two universities venture into the Equatorial Rain Forest of Brazil, seeking to contact a yet unknown tribe of giant Indians. John Vorsleken was South African, but James Bird and Sarah Lockhart were both from the UK. They failed to find that particular tribe, but did locate another tribe, unknown to mankind. The story relates their fears, the dangers they encountered. They stayed with the tribe, videoed, and voice recorded them over many weeks, eventually returning home, with substantial recordings to delight their university sponsors. John returned to South...

In 2013, the largest Ebola outbreak in history swept across West Africa, claiming thousands of lives in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea and sending the international community into panic. By 2014, experts were grimly predicting that millions would be infected within months, and a huge international control effort was mounted to contain the virus. Yet paradoxically, at this point the disease was already going into decline in Africa itself. Why did outside observers get it so wrong?

Paul Richards draws on his extensive firsthand experience in Sierra Leone to argue that the international...