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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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