A rousing saga of the anti-microbial front, full of compelling scientific lore and energetic writing.
Emanuel “Manny” Schoenbach, a physician-researcher, battles wartime infectious diseases with careful epidemiology and wonder drugs in this vivid remembrance.
Wendy Reasenberg (Manny Schoenbach’s daughter) and her niece Anna Kade Schoenbach, both science writers, lightly fictionalize Manny’s true-life exploits during World War II in this narrative. The story opens in 1941 with Manny and other Harvard Medical School epidemiologists flying into Halifax to cope with a triple outbreak of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and meningitis. There, he helps implement a tracing and inoculation program that quells the diphtheria epidemic and successfully treats meningitis cases with new sulfa drugs. After the Pearl Harbor attack, he joins the Army Epidemiological Board and reports to Fort Meade, Maryland, where he does more work on meningitis, an often-fatal bacterial ailment that could decimate troop transports. He conducts a grueling study that requires soldier-volunteers to spend two hours a day with cotton balls stuffed part-way down their throats to collect bacterial samples and ascertains that prophylactic dosing with sulfa drugs prevents infection—an insight that wins him a commendation ribbon. Later chapters follow Manny’s post-war research studying novel antibiotics, discovering that the cancer drug diamidine can cure blastomycosis (an often fatal fungal infection), and saving his own son from the autoimmune disease erythema multiforme with an experimental hormone treatment. The authors’ treatment of Manny’s brief life—he died in 1952 at the age of 40—includes intriguing tutorials on diseases, conveyed in novelistic prose that’s dense with atmospherics. (“‘Meningitis,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and leaning forward. ‘While it is not generally known, in World War I, meningitis killed as many soldiers as bullets did.’”) They also colorfully depict the wartime mood, from hectic relocations and housing searches to the gung-ho enthusiasm of mission-driven doctors. (“We can knock the stuffing out of these three rotten bums,” says Manny to his Halifax germ-fighting team.) The result is a captivating account of two-fisted epidemiology on the march.
A rousing saga of the anti-microbial front, full of compelling scientific lore and energetic writing.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798871165461
Page Count: 238
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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