Rigorous, tenacious research uncovers a grim story of human suffering.
Veteran magazine editor Tayman debuts with a cold-eyed account of the Hawaiian government’s century-long forced quarantine and effective imprisonment of lepers.
Leprosy, called by the Hawaiian people “the sickness that is a crime” because it leads to gross disfigurement, probably arrived with the whaling ships to the islands by the early 1800s. It was believed to be incurable and wildly infectious; in fact, it is caused by a bacteria and communicable only to persons with a genetic susceptibility. After the islands’ decimation by a smallpox epidemic in 1853, King Kamehameha V pledged to preserve the health of his subjects, and the Board of Health, prodded by the alarms sounded by Dr. William Hillebrand, moved to criminalize those showing symptoms of leprosy. Beginning in 1866,victims were arrested, isolated and exiled to the rocky, barren island of Molokai. The first dozen were deposited in a deserted village with no medical facilities and inadequate food; as incurables, they were expected to die. Many did indeed perish as the population swelled: Patients split into factions, fought for food and rebelled against the beleaguered superintendent. During the colony’s most populous era, in the late 1880s, Molokai was home to 1,144 inmates and had 432 buildings; it became habitable, even comfortable, according to Robert Louis Stevenson and other famous observers. Tayman offers numerous fascinating personal stories of people arrested and exiled to Molokai, sometimes with mistaken leprosy diagnoses. He profiles the tireless Flemish priest Father Damien, who caught the disease himself and died in 1889, and gives chilling details about medical experiments performed to isolate the leprosy bacilli. The author does not neglect the political ramifications of a leper colony growing in size at a time when America had its eye on annexing Hawaii and turning it into a vacation paradise. He hauntingly depicts the devastation of an ill-understood disease and helps demystify its victims, too often viewed as “sinful, shameful, and unclean.”
Rigorous, tenacious research uncovers a grim story of human suffering.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-3300-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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