FEVER BY MARY BETH KEANE

Fever tells the torrid tale of the life of Mary Mallon, an Irish-American immigrant who became the first known healthy carrier of the pathogen that causes typhoid fever, and the only one to be imprisoned long-term for her condition. She is better known to American history as the infamous “Typhoid Mary.” But readers will feel compelled to qualify that epithet after finishing Mary Beth Keane’s sympathetic portrayal of this woman scorned by circumstance.

Keane credits Judith Walzer Leavitt’s book Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health as her “starting point and . . . touchstone” during the four years she spent writing the novel. Thankfully, Keane takes a few liberties that bring Mary to life beyond the historical account, like the wonderfully drawn friends and fellow immigrant-occupants of her 33rd Street tenement building. Most prominent among them is her lover and companion of nearly 30 years, Alfred Breihof. Their relationship is Mary’s thread to the world as she is whisked away and isolated, in truly Kafkaesque fashion, on North Brother Island in the middle of the East River. And it is the thread running wildly through the narrative, threatening always to tangle or to snap. It’s a faltering, ultimately tragic love story that leaves just the narrowest gap for the light of hope—hope that a strong woman, who bravely refused to concede her inalienable rights but who could never shake the love of a hapless cad, could in the end find some peace within herself.

The history lesson alone is worthwhile: the rich portrait of New York City during the early 20th century, an era of sweeping change. Its class divisions and immigrant life, its awkwardly young public health awareness, its teeming growth, all create a veracious space in which Keane’s characters move. Their dilemmas are never easy and their decisions are often questionable, making for a read that is as morally challenging as it is quickly paced. Fans of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will find stirring parallels in Fever. Ultimately, this is a story that provokes a deeper understanding of the tenuous relationship between love, personal liberty and the common good.

DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A TALE OF MADNESS, MEDICINE, and MURDER OF A PRESIDENT BY CANDICE MILLARD

Garfield, who had been a Civil War general and a nine-term member of Congress from Ohio, was shot less than four months into his presidency. A series of medical errors resulted in his death even though the bullet wounds were not fatal. A lesser-known fact is that inventor Alexander Graham Bell worked tirelessly and was able to invent, in a short period of time, a medical device theoretically capable of finding the bullet in his back.

In the best tradition of the great writers of narrative nonfiction, Ms. Millard deftly blends the stories of Garfield and Bell and assassin Charles Guiteau and makes readers feel as if they were witnesses to the key events.

Those who read her masterful account of Theodore Roosevelt’s post-presidential trip down the Amazon, “River of Doubt,” will be pleased to find more of her research and narrative prowess in this volume. Roosevelt (who described that trip, taken when he was 55, as “my last chance to be a boy”) is a more colorful and historically significant subject than Garfield, but there are enough twists and turns in this rendition of Garfield’s life to hold a reader’s interest.

Garfield, one of a series of relatively unmemorable presidents who served in the late 1800s between Lincoln and Roosevelt, was an unlikely winner of the GOP nod for the nation’s top job in 1880. At the time, he was a congressman and gave the presidential nominating speech for Ohio Republican Sen. John Sherman. However, he was such a compelling orator and appealing candidate that he was nominated as the compromise choice. He beat out, among others, former President Ulysses S. Grant.

While Ms. Millard’s political history is solid, it’s not her main focus in this book and those looking for a first-rate political biography of Garfield should read Ken Ackerman’s “Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of James A. Garfield.”

Garfield was sworn in on March 4, 1881 and on July 2 was shot while waiting to board a train in Washington by Guiteau, a crazed patronage seeker. One of the bullets struck his back, broke two of his ribs and grazed an artery, but didn’t hit his spinal cord.

Physicians sought to remove the bullet, though in the pre X-ray era had difficulty locating its exact whereabouts. In addition, Ms. Millard argues, they made matters wore by using unsanitary equipment and ignoring the then-new discoveries about antiseptic surgery by British physician Joseph Lister.

In frustration, Garfield’s lead physician D. Willard Bliss consulted with Bell who had invented an instrument called the induction balance, a metal detection device that once it found metal would send a sound to a telephone receiver attached to it. Bell wasn’t able to find the bullet, however, because Bliss only allowed him to look for it on the right side of Garfield’s body. The bullet was lodged in his left side.

The president would die on Sept. 19, 1881. Based on details from the autopsy, Ms. Millard concludes it “became immediately, and painfully apparent that, far from preventing or even delaying the president’s death, the doctors very likely caused it.” This tale of physician error contextualized by politics and murder makes for riveting reading. Ms. Millard recounts this episode of our nation’s history in a style that keeps readers on the edge of their seats even though the ending is known.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/sep/30/book-review-destiny-of-the-republic/#ixzz2vkriSh19
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

THE STREET SWEEPER BY ELLIOT PERLMAN

From the civil rights struggle in the United States to the Nazi crimes against humanity in Europe, there are more stories than people passing one another every day on the bustling streets of every crowded city. Only some stories survive to become history.

Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams, an African American probationary janitor in a Manhattan hospital and father of a little girl he can’t locate, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly patient, a Holocaust survivor who was a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

A few blocks uptown, historian Adam Zignelik, an untenured Columbia professor, finds both his career and his long-term romantic relationship falling apart. Emerging from the depths of his own personal history, Adam sees, in a promising research topic suggested by an American World War II veteran, the beginnings of something that might just save him professionally, and perhaps even personally.

As these men try to survive in early-twenty-first-century New York, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen. Two very different paths—Lamont’s and Adam’s—lead to one greater story asThe Street Sweeper, in dealing with memory, love, guilt, heroism, the extremes of racism and unexpected kindness, spans the twentieth century to the present, and spans the globe from New York to Chicago to Auschwitz.

Epic in scope, this is a remarkable feat of storytelling.

STILL LIFE WITH BREAD CRUMBS BY ANNA QUINDLEN

Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Quindlen's seventh novel, offers the literary equivalent of comfort food. Like her most recent book of essays, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, it goes down easy and demonstrates that she still has her finger firmly planted on the pulse of her generation. It's an appealing fantasy about a late-middle-aged empty-nester's resuscitation of her flagging life by making big changes — and opening herself up to new energy, inspiration and unlikely love. Quindlen clearly hasn't lost her common touch, her ability to combine terrific powers of empathy with a journalist's skill at sussing the zeitgeist and highlighting just the right details. (Example: Urban woman, new to country living, asks for nearest gym and is directed to the local high school.)

Rebecca Winter, Quindlen's protagonist, is a 60-year-old photographer who snapped her most famous photograph, the eponymous Still Life with Bread Crumbs, in the aftermath of yet another command performance dinner party, after which her unbearably supercilious husband, a British academic, retreated to bed, leaving her to clean up the mess. She became a feminist darling with her mainly domestic-themed photography, but two-plus decades later, her star is no longer so bright. She notes, "the coin of notoriety pays with less and less interest as time goes by."

Meanwhile, Rebecca's expenses have skyrocketed. Like so many of her generation, she's been caught off-guard with the burden of caring for her aged parents, helping with the rent on her father's downsized apartment and her mother's nursing home fees, plus an occasional assist to her filmmaker son.

What to do? Rebecca decides to cut costs by subletting the beloved Upper West Side Manhattan apartment she moved into after her contemptible husband left her for the next in his chain of ever-younger wives, and rent a cottage upstate in the woods, sight unseen. Of course it's a ramshackle mess, and she's unprepared for rural life. She calls in a roofer to help with a raccoon in her attic, and — no surprise here — he ends up patching up more than her flashing.

i

Anna Quindlen is a formerNew York Times columnist and the author of seven novels and 10 collections of nonfiction.

Maria Krovatin/Courtesy of Random House

Rebecca, "a woman who rarely wept although she knew she would have been better for it," is a quiet, interior character who eschews color in both her photography and her wardrobe. Serendipity plays a huge role in her art and life. She rambles in the woods, often in the company of a neglected runaway dog, who adopts her, and gradually begins seeing things differently. Photographing birds, "it occurred to her that she had known much of life in two dimensions: raccoon, eagle. She had learned to know what things looked like but not what they really amounted to." When she stumbles upon a series of mysterious tiny handmade crosses planted in the woods, surrounded by what appear to be a child's mementos, she knows she has hit on a subject that will resonate. She gives little thought to the provenance of these makeshift memorials, though readers are likely to guess at their significance long before Quindlen spells it out.

The predictability, along with the fact that Quindlen's characters are either enormously sympathetic or just awful, is part of the easy gratification of this tidily constructed, resolutely uplifting romance. Like her best-selling inspirational chapbook, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Quindlen's novel makes a case for seizing control of your life. "People froze you in place. ... More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest," she writes. "So you had a choice: You could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it."

Read an excerpt of Still Life With Bread Crumbs

• Share
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Email
• 1Comment

You must be signed in to leave a comment. Sign In / Register

Please keep your community civil. All comments must follow the NPR.org Community rules and Terms of Use. NPR reserves the right to use