A multifaceted portrait of a disease whose victims, like so many others, are unjustly blamed for their suffering.
A philosophically charged journey through the little-known world of leprosy and its victims.
Basciano is a journalist based in both São Paolo and London, and fittingly, for in this narrative, he recounts the travels and fortunes of leprosy in both the northern world, where it raged for centuries, and tropical Brazil, an epicenter for the disease today. Medieval Europe, with its leprous monks “dead to the earthly world,” once saw untold thousands of cases, a rebuke to the “racist idea of leprosy as a ‘tropical disease.’” Nonetheless, Basciano writes, it is the outsider from the Global South who is depicted by populist politicians elsewhere as a “walking pathogen.” Caused by a bacillus and related to tuberculosis, leprosy can indeed be contagious, though transmittal usually requires extensive contact and the mechanisms are poorly understood. Leprosy has thus acquired both mystique and stigma, with the afflicted suspected of immoral behavior and the conclusion that “only the dirty became diseased.” Basciano’s wide-lens approach takes in numerous historical episodes, such as the introduction of numerous diseases to native Siberian populations by Russian explorers and that motif of the “walking pathogen” as a powerful driver to help the Nazis demonize Jews as “dirty and a corrosive influence.” Other outlandish approaches to the disease involved forced abortions and sterilizing not just the afflicted person but whole families in the mistaken belief that leprosy was hereditary. In Brazil, Basciano notes, while leprosy is “not simply a disease of poverty,” poverty is certainly a dimension, with an outsize representation in the country’s poor northeast. While leprosy is almost absent in the temperate world and is declining in the tropics, hundreds of thousands of people still harbor the bacillus, serving, as Basciano writes empathetically, as “receptacles to hold all society’s ills, living litmus tests for discrimination.”
A multifaceted portrait of a disease whose victims, like so many others, are unjustly blamed for their suffering.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781644454060
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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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