There’s no question that Wright has covered a lot of medical territory with good information; if only she had curbed her...
A lightweight history of plagues from an author who is “invested in this study…because I think knowing how diseases have been combatted in the past will be helpful in the future.”
Wright (It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History, 2015) injects her persona throughout the book, using asides to assert her opinions and invite reader agreement. So we learn that poor John Snow, the hero who persuaded London authorities in the 1850s to turn off the Broad Street pump and thus save the neighborhood from cholera, was a boring fellow she would never want to spend time with. On the other hand, many of her heroes or things they did were “cool,” a word that should have been banished from the text along with “fun.” However, Wright has done her homework. She begins with a second-century plague during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, which was probably smallpox and no doubt contributed to Rome’s eventual decline. The author then moves on to cover the more well-known horrors, including bubonic plague, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, polio, and leprosy. She also adds a chapter on the dancing plague of medieval times, which was unusual in that people treated the victims kindly and tried to help. The 20th century brought us Typhoid Mary and the Spanish flu of World War I. The flu was followed by the still-mysterious encephalitis lethargica (see Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings). The midcentury brought the polio vaccine but also a plague by another name: lobotomy. Wright notes that there were 40,000 lobotomies in the U.S. from the 1930s through the 1970s. Many of the operations were performed by Walter Freeman, whom Wright justifiably vilifies for his tireless promotion of the surgery for all mental ills. The author saves the AIDS epidemic for an epilogue as a worst-case scenario of society’s stigmatizing and blaming the victim, singling out the Reagan administration for its do-nothing approach.
There’s no question that Wright has covered a lot of medical territory with good information; if only she had curbed her enthusiasm to pontificate.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-746-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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