This tale of “criminal stupidity” would have had far more impact as a long-form magazine article.
Account of one of the worst typhoid outbreaks in American history.
Dekok (Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, 2009) re-creates an epidemic that ravaged Ithaca, N.Y., for four months in 1903, killing 82 people, including 29 Cornell University students. Some 1,300 others contracted typhoid but survived. In a generally engaging but overly detailed narrative, the author sets the scene by describing life in the pleasantly prosperous town of 13,000, where most students lived off-campus and drank city water in their boardinghouses. In an era before government regulation, businessman William T. Morris, owner of the Ithaca Water Works, decided not to go to the expense of building a filtration plant, which allowed water provided by his company to become contaminated. Morris “simply didn’t care,” writes Dekok. Investigators discovered that the typhoid bacilli entered the water supply from the excrement of immigrant Italian workers at a reservoir construction site. One or more was apparently a carrier of typhoid, for which there was no cure until 1949. Before long, one in 10 Ithaca residents were ill, the city’s medical facilities were overrun and about 1,000 Cornell students fled for home. Two camps of opinion formed: One was furious that Morris had not taken steps to keep his water pure; the other (including Morris and the local establishment newspaper) insisted the epidemic was not so bad and the water company had no responsibility. In fact, courts then rarely held water companies liable for deaths caused by their water. With victims laid up in hospitals and at home, noted sanitation engineer George A. Soper ended the health crisis through aggressive disinfection of the city’s boardinghouses and outhouses. Health insurance was a rarity. Cornell trustee Andrew Carnegie stepped up to cover the devastating medical costs of victims, living and dead. Morris’s corporation evolved over ensuing decades into General Public Utilities Corp., which owned the Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
This tale of “criminal stupidity” would have had far more impact as a long-form magazine article.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7627-6008-4
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
