Extensive research, sturdy prose, impressive analysis. (25 halftones throughout)
Three intrepid doctors have absolute authority to battle bubonic plague in 1900 Honolulu, but their policy of burning the houses of the infected results, inadvertently, in a conflagration and a contentious civil crisis.
Mohr (History/Univ. of Oregon), who has previously charted the choreography of physicians and public officials (Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth Century America, 1996, not reviewed), focuses here on the roles of medical professionals in public-health emergencies. When plague cases first appeared in Honolulu in late 1899, no one imagined that scores would die, thousands would be homeless, entire city blocks would be destroyed, and racial relations in the city—ever an issue—would worsen. The author begins with a glimpse of what happened on January 12, 1900 (the day the fire raced through the city), then retreats for half his text to examine a variety of medical and political contexts and to lead us back to his starting point. He explains that researchers had identified the culprit (the pestis bacillus). But no one knew how that bacterium infected humans. Rats were dying in droves, too, but no one suspected a connection. The Hawaiian government was in transition: the US was annexing the islands, but there was yet no official, only an ad hoc, territorial authority. When the plague appeared in Honolulu’s Chinatown, however, three physicians took command to battle both the disease and the fierce forces of various ethnic, racial, and political constituencies (not to mention their own conservative colleagues and a capricious press). Whites deluded themselves initially, believing the disease was attacking only the “unclean” Asians in the de-facto ghettos. One death of an affluent white changed opinions. The physicians became benevolent dictators—condemning property, ordering fumigations and antiseptic showers, organizing evacuations and detention camps, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars from Hawaii’s tiny treasury. Particularly strong chapters near the end describe the actual blaze and its aftermath.
Extensive research, sturdy prose, impressive analysis. (25 halftones throughout)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-19-516231-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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
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