Product Description

In this account, a journalist traces the course of yellow fever, stopping in 1878 Memphis to "vividly [evoke] the Faulkner-meets-'Dawn of the Dead' horrors,"*-and moving on to today's strain of the killer virus.

Over the course of history, yellow fever has paralyzed governments, halted commerce, quarantined cities, moved the U.S. capital, and altered the outcome of wars. During a single summer in Memphis alone, it cost more lives than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Johnstown flood combined.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country-and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism,"** it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48647 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-07
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In a summer of panic and death in 1878, more than half the population of Memphis, Tenn., fled the raging yellow fever epidemic, which finally waned when cooler weather set in. The disease had been transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which came in swarms on ships from the Caribbean or West Africa. This account has a narrower scope than James Dickerson's recent Yellow Fever, focusing on the Memphis tragedy, but journalist Crosby offers a forceful narrative of a disease's ravages and the quest to find its cause and cure. Crosby is particularly good at evoking the horrific conditions in Memphis, "a city of corpses" and rife with illness characterized by high fever, black vomit and hemorrhaging, treated by primitive methods. Crosby also relates arresting tales of heroism, such as how two nuns returned to the quarantined city from a vacation to nurse the victims. The author profiles scientists, some of whom died in their fight to identify the cause of this deadly disease. She also describes more recent outbreaks in Africa: yellow fever is making a frightening comeback despite the existence of a vaccine. Photos. Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers selection. (Nov. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Molly Caldwell Crosby has previously worked for National Geographic magazine, and her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Health, and USA Today, among others.

Customer Reviews

Good Bio!
This is a very interesting true scientific mystery and good bio on Walter Reed.

First-time writer needs to learn to trust her sources and turn down the purple prose
This is prose by which the adjective "purple" is defined. Turns out Molly has a degree, a Masters degree, from Johns Hopkins, mind you, in non-fiction writing, where apparently they teach such. Or perhaps Mrs.. Crosby added them all on her own.

Well, this is hardly an untold story, as Crosby references many secondary sources about plagues, yellow fever, American yellow fever attacks and research, and the Memphis epidemic itself. To be fair, Crosby does mine a goodly number of primary sources to tell the Memphis story in detail, but if you review the source notes you realize how little of her writing is research based, and how much is narrative.

At one point in the body of the book, she describes a yellow fever patient (one of the doctors who was key in discovering the link between mosquitos and yellow fever, in fact) who has be restrained by bounds at the ankles and wrist. But in the notes, she points out (to her credit) that the primary source only said that the patient had to be restrained, and that the ankles and wrists part was her own assumption.

Well and good. But why make up spurious facts? Let the facts speak for themselves. Less is more, people, imagination is stronger than fiction. Report the doctor restrained (in that spare shack that you have accurately described from your primary sources), and let the reader imagine in their minds what that scene must have looked like.

Another concern is that the Memphis part of the story takes up only the first third of the book, and from the jacket publicity and the author's bio informing the reader that the author lives in Memphis, the reader is lead to believe this story is all about Memphis. This misbelief led me to suspect that the last two-thirds of the book, about Walter Reed and yellow fever research in Cuba, and about how a modern yellow fever plague is still possible in the Americas, was after-the-book-deal filler to turn a long magazine feature piece into a book-length story. This perception is also enhanced by the greater reliance on secondary sources for the last two-thirds of the book, which are apparently well-documented elsewhere.

In all, I think if Crosby learns to trust her sources, and turn down her writing, she has a chance to be a good popular historian.

things you never knew...and never thought were related to yellow fever
This book presents an overview of the (still unfinished) fight against yellow fever from the time it was a mysterious, dreaded illness until the present - when we know more about it, but the disease remains incurable. The author does an excellent job of pulling together seemingly disparate information and showing how it all coalesces to form the pattern of the disease. Even though the reader may know that the disease is spread by mosquitoes, the scientific search for that breakthrough information is described step by step with the author using this century's hindsight to illumine the efforts of scientists over a hundred years ago to try understand and thus control this disease. The experiments that were done to try to isolate the causative agent were creative - and dangerous - and the book does an excellent job of helping the reader to understand how heroic those early scientists were.