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SILENT TRAVELERS

GERMS, GENES, AND THE IMMIGRANT MENACE

Fascinating, well-researched account of how immigration and public health have influenced each other in the American experience. Kraut (History/American University; Huddled Masses, etc.— not reviewed) asserts that ``the double helix of health and fear that accompanies immigration continues to mutate, producing malignancies on the culture.'' Current fears about AIDS and Haitian refugees, for example, echo the concern of Californians in the early 1900's over bubonic plague and Chinese immigrants and that of easterners in the 1830's over cholera and Irish immigrants. Kraut examines the nativist prejudices that can stigmatize an entire group as a health menace and shows how scientific medicine has been used by some Americans to advocate exclusion and by others to promote assimilation. Further, he looks at how national, state, and local governments have codified and regulated public-health issues and what the immigrant response has been. Kraut vividly and sympathetically describes the inspection of newcomers at Ellis Island, using both oral history sources and excerpts from the US Public Health Service's Book of Instructions for the Medical Inspection of Immigrants. He demonstrates how health care became a cultural battleground involving the home, the hospital, and the corner drugstore as folk healers and midwives met opposition from physicians and home health nurses, and as quackery thrived. Reliance on Old World remedies—such as tying a potato to the wrist to reduce a fever or using charms to ward off the evil eye—conflicted with the health advice published by such groups as the DAR, eager to turn immigrants into robust Americans. B&w illustrations include photographs that depict actual conditions, as well as drawings that reveal prevalent attitudes and misperceptions.) Absorbing and sobering illumination of a dark corner of the American psyche.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1994

ISBN: 0-465-07823-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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