Grady, author of a number of New York Times articles on the topic, describes in personal, sometimes-heartrending detail her 2005 visit to Angola to cover the outbreak of Marburg fever there. Then she goes on to profile six more viral diseases that have jumped from animal to human victims: HIV and SARS, Avian Flu, Hantavirus, West Nile and Monkeypox. Rather than getting involved in technicalities, she goes for the human angle, recalling her own anxieties over visiting a country with 10 million land mines and cockroaches the size of hockey pucks. Moreover, she describes the makeshift conditions in a hospital isolation ward with one dying occupant, and admits her mixed feelings about attending a family’s funeral for a possibly infected child. Enhanced by news photos, side notes and a large list of citations to relevant Times articles, her accounts will be useful for assignments. They will also leave readers profoundly affected by not only the dangers of these often-unpredictable potential pandemics, but by the complex challenges facing medical professionals who fight to understand and contain them. (source notes, Internet resources, further reading) (Nonfiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-7534-5995-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Kingfisher
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
The author of the century-old, still-beloved Little Women led an extraordinarily interesting life herself, as Warrick makes plain in this dutiful biography. Alcott’s often-absent father, full of educational dreams and schemes and a friend of Emerson, her hard-working and hard-pressed mother, and her three sisters (models, as is well-known, for the siblings in the book) moved a great deal as she was growing up. Alcott soon realized that if there was to be money, she had to make it, and found a career writing sensational trash under a pseudonym and wonderful family stories under her own name. The biography opens with the story of Alcott’s letters from a Civil War hospital where she worked as a nurse, published in Boston Commonwealth magazine and her first real literary success. Vignettes and quotations enliven the text, which is written in a direct and straightforward style. Alcott’s work as a feminist and her possible love life are mentioned, if briefly. For those seeking yet another biography, this will serve. (b&w photos, not seen, chronology, notes, glossary, index) (Biography. 10-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7660-1254-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Enslow
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
paper 0-395-97499-2 Introducing this overview of everyday life in a Plains Indian village circa 1868 is a map locating tribal lands of the Plains Indians. Contemporary Native Americans pose as models depicting the full regalia of the Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux, Crow, and Blackfeet. In re-enactment style, reminiscent of a visit to a living history village, each “actor” then personifies a member in the family of Real Bird, a northern Cheyenne warrior from the plains of southeastern Montana. A staged full-color photograph of family members engaged in role-specific work, leisure, food preparation, warfare, trade, and ritual is at the center of each spread, surrounded by additional text and captions that expand each topic. Sees the Berries Woman and Pretty Plume Woman demonstrate the construction of a tipi in a frame-by-frame, five-step procedure; warriors and chiefs hold council in a pre-battle ceremony; Timber Leader shows off a bearskin that gives him healing powers. Artifacts such as beadwork, weapons, tools, toys, and medicine objects lend authenticity to this informative survey and history of the culture. (chronology, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-94542-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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