A wealth of information for students of American history and the history of medicine.
An erudite, thoroughly researched account of how infectious diseases and chronic illnesses have evolved in America, from pre-Columbian times to the present.
Grob (Emeritus Professor, History of Medicine/Rutgers Univ.) offers an examination of morbidity and mortality trends that is aimed at a narrower audience than was his highly readable The Mad Among Us (1994). The nature of specific diseases, the complex relationships between humans and pathogens, and the roles played by environment, population density, material comfort, and human behavior are elucidated here in a dauntingly statistics-laden text. Beginning with the introduction of infectious diseases by Europeans that decimated the Native American population, Grob moves on to the nature of the illnesses that afflicted the colonists and then those that came with the growth of cities, the migration of people, and economic development. He delineates the differences in the health of particular groups: blacks, whites, northerners, southerners, infants, coal miners, factory workers, etc. Statistics on life expectancy, morbidity, and mortality abound, although quotes from contemporary sources describing conditions do lighten the text at times. Finally, he examines the decline of infectious diseases and the rise of chronic illnesses as causes of disability and death in the 20th century. Throughout, Grob is careful to speak in probabilities, emphasizing how fragmentary our knowledge is and how much is uncertain. In words reminiscent of Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance,” he concludes with the sobering warning that those predicting that disease can someday be completely conquered are suffering “at best a harmless and at worst a dangerous utopian illusion.”
A wealth of information for students of American history and the history of medicine.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-674-00881-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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 Yorkerstaff 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© 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.
