A mesmerizing, macabre account that will make readers happy they live in the 21st century. The yellow fever epidemic of 1793 snuck up on the people of Philadelphia during the hot summer; by the end of the year, some 10 percent of the city’s population lay dead. Drawing heavily on primary sources, Murphy (Inside the Alamo, p. 393, etc.) takes readers through the epidemic, moving methodically from its detection by the medical community; through its symptoms, treatment, and mortality; its effects on the populace, and what Philadelphia did to counter it. Individual chapters recount the efforts of the heroes of the epidemic: the quasi-legal committee of 12 who took over the running of the city government; the country’s preeminent physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush; and the Free African Society, whose members toiled valiantly to ease the victims’ pain and to dispose of the dead. Powerful, evocative prose carries along the compelling subject matter. Even as the narrative places readers in the moment with quotations, the design aids and abets this, beginning each chapter with reproductions from contemporary newspapers and other materials, as well as placing period illustrations appropriately throughout the text. The account of Philadelphia’s recovery wraps up with a fascinating discussion of historiography, detailing the war of words between Matthew Carey, one of the committee of 12, and Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, the leaders of the Free African Society—interesting in itself, it is also a valuable lesson in reading and writing history. Stellar. (bibliography, illustration credits, index) (Nonfiction. 10+)
Pub Date: April 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-395-77608-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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In the rush to assess and reinterpret the former USSR, Millbrook's six-title series by different authors is serviceable enough, though it has neither the lucid intelligence of Clark's single-volume coverage, The Commonwealth of Independent States (above) nor the detail of Lerner's as-yet incomplete series on individual states, edited by Mary M. Rodgers et al. (e.g., Lithuania, p. 1508). This volume of ``The Former Soviet States'' series, for instance, suffers from awkward phrasing (``...the standard of living of most of the people of the Soviet Union [in 1985] was unbelievably low''—What does ``unbelievably'' mean here? ``Low'' compared to what?), while of the information is oversimplified and some explanations are too truncated to be clear. Still, Roberts makes an adequate introduction to the historic crossroads occupied by Russian Orthodox Georgia and Armenia and their Muslim neighbor, an area with particularly bitter ethnic strife, and also threatened by interference from neighbors Turkey and Iran. ``Outlook'' (summary of major current issues); ``Facts and Figures''; chronology—confusingly formatted with six ``Famous People'' (Peter I, Stalin, Mstilav Rostopovish, et al.); maps, photos, and historical prints; index. (Nonfiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-56294-309-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Millbrook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
In Toll's remembrance, art equals hope: her happy family pictures, painted in the secret room where she and her mother hid from the Nazis and the Poles, show extraordinary preteen talent (some of the 29 powerfully evocative paintings reproduced here now hang in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel) as well as the will to survive. Nelly's plight—going from bonbons served on silver platters to hiding behind false walls—was not atypical. In some ways reminiscent of Maus, this emotionally complex and informative memoir reports the willingness of some neighbors to turn in Jews for a bag of potatoes and a bottle of vodka. Adults are keenly observed: a tutor nearly becomes a sex offender; the paranoid man who hides Nelly is both horrifying (wife-beating) and funny (he parades through town with a stack of hats on his head, Ö la Caps for Sale). The poignancy is heightened by evocative language (``minutes walked by with small steps'') and raw emotional hunger (``waiting, waiting for Papa''), and by the postwar rush to reconstitute families by swift remarriages—not seen in many Holocaust books, but an important aspect of healing (cf. Ruth Minsky Sender's To Life, 1988). (Nonfiction. 10+)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8037-1362-2
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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