Armchair historians, San Francisco-philes, and doctors interested in their profession’s past will find this particularly...
Real-life medical thriller providing a slice of history we don’t want to repeat.
The bubonic plague threatened San Francisco for a decade at the turn of the century. In her debut, Wall Street Journal reporter Chase documents how federal authorities put an end to the epidemic. Public health disasters can only be averted, she learned from her research, if local, state, and federal health agencies work together. When the plague arrived in 1900, racism against Chinese immigrants, its initial victims, kept federal health inspectors from documenting and instituting measures to eradicate the scourge. Then boosters in the Golden State’s railroad and agricultural industries stymied federal decontamination efforts, because they didn’t want anything to impede California trade. Finally, disputes in Washington agencies bogged down the cleanup. Chase’s narrative focuses on two pioneers in American public health, Joseph Kinyon and Rupert Blue, to convey the difficulty of overcoming the public’s ignorance about how the plague spread and the importance of education and a good public relations campaign in saving lives. If San Franciscans had listened to self-righteous and rough-edged Kinyon instead of running him out of town on a rail, they would never have needed the brilliant and diplomatic Blue, who saved the city from mass death in the wake of the Great Earthquake, which drove hordes of plague-bearing rats out of their warrens in 1906. Much space is devoted to old-time medicine—rudimentary testing for plague bacteria, transferring blood samples from a human corpse to a guinea pig, inoculating people with serums derived from horses—and sometimes these scenes make for a plodding read. But usually there’s satisfaction to be found in being lost in Chase’s narrative. Blue’s meticulous cleanup campaign provides plenty of color as he burns down entire city hospitals and cleans up slaughterhouses teeming with rodents.
Armchair historians, San Francisco-philes, and doctors interested in their profession’s past will find this particularly gripping.Pub Date: March 25, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50496-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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