An unforgettable book.
The harrowing story of two brilliant immunologists, one Christian, one Jewish, who were separated during World War II yet found heroic ways to turn their typhus vaccine research against the Nazis.
In a twist of irony not lost on Allen (Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato, 2010, etc.), Nazis were deathly afraid of lice. The little insects were known to carry typhus, a dreadful contagious disease that ravaged communities forced to live in subhuman conditions, including soldiers on the war front as well as inmates in concentration camps and ghettos. It therefore became a wartime imperative to eradicate the disease. In Poland, scientist Rudolf Weigl (1883-1957) and his assistant, Ludwig Fleck (1896-1961)—who would later write the seminal text The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact—were both enlisted to develop a typhus vaccine: Weigl in the service of the German army and Fleck under SS guard at Buchenwald. Their stories, beautifully told within the devastating tumult of Poland's unfolding history, describe the war from a vivid perspective: that of the laboratory saboteur. Weigl secretly used his lab to smuggle vaccines to the Polish ghettos and recruited many intellectuals as lab workers, saving their lives. (Frequently, these respected thinkers would be hired as louse-feeders, letting the creatures feed on their own blood—a surreal scene.) Meanwhile, Fleck's lab was also a center of conspiracy, and his sabotage was even more dangerous and cunning: He produced a fake typhus vaccine for German troops and Nazi experimenters while sneaking real doses to desperate inmates. Both scientists risked terrible deaths to defend the idea of moral good despite the corruption, bloodshed and evil surrounding them. Allen is unflinching in his retelling of this monstrous era, but he manages to avoid writing a depressing narrative. Instead, Weigl, Fleck and their vaccines illuminate the inherent social complexities of science and truth and reinforce the overriding good of man.
An unforgettable book.Pub Date: July 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08101-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
The American ``occupation'' of Britain during WW II—the phrase is George Orwell's—could have been a disaster but, in the event, was almost a triumph. As Reynolds (History/Cambridge Univ.; co-author of An Ocean Apart, not reviewed) points out, by D-Day there were 1,650,000 members of the US armed forces on an overcrowded island. The bulk of the 426,000 American airmen were in Norfolk and Suffolk; it was as if 130 air bases had been dropped down in the state of Vermont. GIs received three times the pay of British soldiers. Many of the British men were away, their wives and girlfriends alone, and the US troops rich and available—hence the contemporary clichÇ that the Yanks were ``oversexed, overpaid, overfed, and over here.'' Less familiar, writes Reynolds, was the GIs' riposte, that the British were ``undersexed, underpaid, underfed, and under Eisenhower.'' The Americans also brought with them their own unresolved social problems: Less than five percent of the black soldiers had voted in the previous five years, and for all the concern of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, the armed forces still practiced de facto racial segregation. British and American attitudes to prostitution and venereal disease were very different. The British viewed these not as matters of public health but of personal privacy, into which the state should not venture. To the Americans, a VD rate of 58 cases per 1,000 troops was unacceptable. Despite all these potential sources of serious friction, the British military historian Liddell Hart ``could not `think of any case in history' where relations between occupier and occupied had been so good.'' The credit goes partly to the British themselves, who made significant concessions, partly to the good humor of both peoples, and partly to the example of Eisenhower himself, who in this, as in other matters, appears in retrospect a gifted leader. Reynolds brings good judgment, humor, and a deep knowledge of the United States as well as Britain to bear in this perceptive account of a little noticed aspect of the ``special relationship.''
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42161-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
An insightful biography of a compelling and paradoxical protagonist of modern French culture. In depicting the life and career of Gyp, Silverman (French/Penn State Univ.) illuminates the many contradictions of fin-de-siäcle France. Sibylle-Gabrielle Marie-Antoinette de Riquetti de Mirabeau, comtesse de Martel de Janville, adopted the male nom de plume ``Gyp.'' An extraordinarily prolific writer, she produced, between 1880 and 1930, over 100 novels, 20 plays, hundreds of articles, and four volumes of memoirs. She was the last descendant of the great Revolutionary orator Mirabeau; not without consequence, she was also related to the notorious counter- revolutionary Mirabeau-Tonneau. This contradictory political legacy would eventually coalesce to create what Silverman calls a ``right- wing anarchist.'' Gyp was a fervid nationalist and fanatical defender of the French Right. In 1899, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, when asked to state her profession, she replied, ``Anti- Semite.'' Her political heroes included Napoleon, General Boulanger, and other champions of the centralized, authoritarian state. Gyp's political contradictions were matched by personal ones. As a woman and the last of the Mirabeau line, she was never allowed to forget that the distinguished family name would die with her. Her officer father, often absent, was killed in an absurd military accident, and her mother was an unloving woman, jealous of her daughter's commercial and social success. In her obsessive desire to obtain power and autonomy, as well as her crusade against the corset and arranged marriages, Gyp was sometimes deemed a feminist, an attribute she vehemently rejected as she created a personal, Manichean myth of female vice and male virtue. But if we allow the oxymoron of a ``right-wing anarchist,'' then we can admit a second conceptual contradiction—Gyp as a ``misogynist feminist.'' Although Silverman's characterization of Gyp as an anarchist is strained, the book is a fascinating examination of fin-de-siäcle France and one of its most provocative figures.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508754-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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