Solid information on a serious subject, delivered with great assurance and style. (27 b&w illustrations)
The author of Quarantine! (1997), which showed eastern European Jews being blamed for typhus and cholera outbreaks in 19th-century New York, chronicles six immigrant-associated epidemics of the 20th century.
Covering tuberculosis, bubonic plague, trachoma, typhus, AIDS, and cholera, Markel (History of Medicine, Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases/Univ. of Michigan) provides for each disease a description of its characteristics, how it’s spread, its effects on the human body, and how it’s treated; he also makes good use of personal stories to illuminate the responses that the appearance of each disease has elicited from health officials and the general American public. The experiences of Alejandro, an illegal alien from Ecuador, and Abdul, a native of Ethiopia, illustrate the unpredictability of tuberculosis and the stigma it still bears today. Markel shows how the fear and panic that struck San Francisco in 1900, when Chick Gin was found to have died of bubonic plague, led to a full-scale quarantine of Chinatown, the burning of Chinese property, and an attempt to enforce compulsory inoculations of an experimental vaccine. The 1916 typhus riots along the Texas-Mexico border reveals the difficulties of trying to halt the spread of communicable disease from Mexico, one unintended consequence of which has been the rise in illegal immigration from that country. The story of Tomas, one of thousands of HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, demonstrates the commitment of the US to protecting itself from the worldwide AIDS epidemic. The final episode involves Markel himself in a diagnostic fiasco when reports of cholera outbreaks in Rwanda lead him to assume that he is seeing the disease in some recently arrived refugees. An epilogue sums up the author’s thoughts on safeguarding public health in a world where globalization and international travel ensure that infectious diseases cannot be confined by national boundaries.
Solid information on a serious subject, delivered with great assurance and style. (27 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42095-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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