by Catharine Arnold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2018
A wealth of stories of gruesome infection, lack of health care, and further transmission. A well-researched but ugly history...
Arnold (Globe: Life in Shakespeare's London, 2015, etc.) collects global eyewitness accounts of Spanish flu, clearly illustrating why it caused more deaths than World War I.
The virus began in early 1918 and wreaked havoc around the world until summer 1919. It was considered a bacterial infection, and few questioned it since other diseases—e.g., cholera and plague—were bacterial. The modern concept of the virus was unknown in 1918, and the world war helped to create a perfect storm of factors that fed the virus. A massive military base in northern France housed a port, railway yards, stores, prisons, training areas, stables, and piggeries as well as areas to house ducks, geese, and chickens to feed the army. Ducks were a reservoir for bird flu viruses, and their feces would be absorbed by the other animals that were kept for food. Nearby was a general hospital, and 100 trains per day brought wounded from the front to be treated by up to 10,000 medical staff. This was where the first case appeared. The wounded were repatriated or returned to the front, carrying the disease throughout Europe. In America, a case appeared on a Kansas farm, and then an overcrowded Army camp in Kansas witnessed outbreak. The first appearances were spotty; most patients recovered, and it vanished as quickly as it appeared. Not so the second wave in the summer, as the author amply shows, when it struck with a deadly virulence. Any large gathering was potentially deadly, including massive troop movements, bond drives, and victory parades not to mention troop ships, which became floating incubators. It was an unusual flu in that it arrived in summer rather than winter and struck the young and fit rather than the old and infirm. By the time it passed, it had killed one-third of the world’s population.
A wealth of stories of gruesome infection, lack of health care, and further transmission. A well-researched but ugly history that may fatigue readers by the end.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13943-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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