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 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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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