by Stephen Coss ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 2016
A solid first book in which impressive documentation undergirds an ambitious assertion.
In his debut, Wisconsin-based historian Coss examines the Colonial smallpox epidemic and how it influenced the forging of American identity and politics.
The outbreak of smallpox in Boston in 1721, though long overdue, caused panic and coverup, as reported in this compelling though slightly overlong narrative. The HMS Seahorse was certainly carrying smallpox-infested passengers from England when shipmates were allowed to shuttle into Boston in April, spreading the virus around town and causing outbreak by May. The eminent minister Cotton Mather, undergoing personal crises at this point (even though the trauma of the Salem witch trials were 30 years behind him) and still determined to continue progress in the community through his effective leadership, grasped the efficacy of inoculation through Royal Society articles and began to promote it. Meanwhile, a crusading Boston physician and apothecary, Zabdiel Boylston, resolved to attempt the inoculation procedure, using his own son and slave as patients, in defiance of the town meeting that condemned the procedure. (Inoculation had already been undertaken in London.) James Franklin (Benjamin’s older brother), the Boston publisher of the New-England Courant, first attacked the cause of inoculation and let the public controversy within his pages fuel his circulation. All these public-health events foamed around the ongoing resentment of the vilified governor, Samuel Shute, who was battling for supremacy in the Massachusetts House. Franklin’s “taunting and belligerent” Courant offered outrageous editorial commentary on a running dispute over official reaction to meeting Native-American aggression, and the publisher was jailed as a result. Coss valiantly weaves these threads together, though these are only some of the many roiling disputes of the day; in the end, the convergence entailing Franklin’s Courant seems somewhat forced. Nonetheless, Coss offers a fascinating glimpse inside the Boston mindset of the era.
A solid first book in which impressive documentation undergirds an ambitious assertion.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8308-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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