Fever Season: The Story of a Terrifying Epidemic and the People Who Saved a City

I had never heard of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee. In New Orleans, the repeated yellow fever epidemics that plagued the city throughout the 19th century are a common theme on historical plaques and tours around town, but despite repeated trips to Memphis, I wasn't familiar with this history. (I guess yellow fever isn't a hot topic at Graceland.) Anyway. Yellow fever is one of those dread diseases that, even if there is still no cure, we call all be thankful that we now know how to prevent. Incidentally, yellow fever was also one of the major killers of men building the Panama Canal.

Jeannette Keith begins Fever Season explaining the extent to which Memphis was a dirty, dysfunctional city. As she succinctly notes on page 27: "As a center for the cotton trade, Memphis was spectacularly successful. As a city, it was a failure." (Charlie LeDuff recently wrote an entire book premised on that latter statement as it pertains to Detroit today.)  In any case, the Ae. aegypti mosquito breeds in fresh, clean water, like that the housewives across the city used to collect in cisterns each day. It is no surprise, then, that Memphis - and cities across the South - regularly experienced outbreaks of yellow fever. The 1878 outbreak was especially virulent, though, killing the vast majority of those who contracted it and decimating the entire population.

Fever Season offers a glimpse not only of a terrifying disease whose hallmark was the especially foul-smelling black vomit, but of the American South in the year immediately after Reconstruction. Although black and white worked side-by-side to nurse the sick and police the city, such commonality of purpose could not and did not last. In the closing pages, Keith builds the case for how the yellow fever epidemic laid the groundwork for Elvis's initial Memphis success some 75 years later. 

In My Father's Court

In My Father's Court is Isaac Bashevis Singer's memoir of growing up as a Hasidic rabbi's son in pre-World War I Warsaw. As a rabbi, his father functions as both a spiritual and religious adviser (determining, for example, whether a particular food is kosher), but also a legal arbiter (determining monetary damages and performing marriages and divorces). His household, then, is at the center of their particular community. In My Father's Court initially reads as a series of short stories. Although the author is clearly gaining a year here and there, the stories do not feel connected for most of the book. In the later chapters, war breaks out and then, his family's lives, like virtually every other European family, is first shaped and then dominated by the war around them. As with other central European countries, access to various Polish cities was possible - or not - depending on which army controlled a particular territory at any given time. When conditions for obtaining a visa and traveling to his mother's hometown at last permit, he, his younger brother, and mother leave their father/husband in Warsaw and spent the last year of the war in Bilgoray, one of the many shtetls dotting the Central European countryside.

In My Father's Court is a window back to a world that no longer exists. It is in turns deeply amusing (as when a visitor bemoans the hustle and bustle of life in 1910-era Warsaw, with everyone rushing to and fro) and also forebodingly sad (for example, the numerous times that, as a character's anecdote finishes, the readers learns that this particular man/woman/boy/girl will not survive the Holocaust). In the closing pages, speaking of the larger Jewish community, Isaac's older brother asks their mother, "How long do you think Europe will stand for this clump of Asia in its midst?" The answer, of course, was not even a decade.

A Tale for the Time Being

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is the story of a woman on Canada's Pacific coast who finds ocean garbage one day only to discover it is the diary and other miscellaneous possessions of a young Japanese girl. The girl, Naoko, grew up in Sunnyvale, California, but has returned to Tokyo and is experiencing definite adjustment issues. Her 104-year-old Buddhist monk great-grandmother tries to help Nao, and Nao in turn determines to write the older woman's life story.

I picked this book up pretty much entirely because it is set in Japan - Ueno Park, the banks of the Sumida River, Asakusa, the Shinkansen trains...all of the things I have been living and breathing for the past year as I pull together the Japan study abroad program. The stories of Nao and the woman who finds the diary, Ruth, are nicely women together and the narrative is interesting and engaging. This is a 400-page book that reads much faster than that. I enjoyed it immensely - right up until the last 50 pages or so. Right about then, the book became a little too Time Traveler's Wife-y for me. Honestly, I hate when author's fiddle with time (for my full rant, see 13, rue Thérèse). The time lapses feel like a gimmick - this is a strong book and a strong story without resorting to such antics and, for me, the suspension of reality felt like cheating. The story didn't need it and, without giving too much away, it seemed the author used the trick of time only to answer one question that she couldn't otherwise answer. 

Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle

Lady Almina is the history of the life and times of the 5th Countess of Carnarvon, i.e., the real-life counterpart of Cora Crawley. Almina Wombwell was an heiress to the Rothschild fortune whose marriage to the Earl of Carnarvon shored up Highclere Castle, aka Downton Abbey, at the turn of the 20th century. Lady Almina was a bit of a fireball, traveling regularly with her husband to Egypt (where he would eventually discover King Tut's tomb, then die of blood poisoning on the eve of its full uncovering) and, perhaps most importantly, helping to make nursing a proper and respectable profession for women - young and old - of the upper class. The ladies who came of age a decade later (whose own remarkable stories are told in Debs at War), likely owe much Lady Almina (and a small handful of similarly minded women like her).

Lady Almina is remarkable not only for its connections to Downton Abbey - for example, the distinctive green wall coverings in the drawing room that figures prominently in many DA episodes, were the work of Lady Almina  - but for the family and castle's own history during World War I. Highclere, yes, was a hospital for wounded officers during the war and the author, the current Countess of Carnarvon, reminds her readers that such hospitals were the backbone of a healthcare system that largely did not otherwise exist, hospitals and doctors being largely, almost exclusively, funded by wealthy individuals. Before and after it was a hospital, though, Highclere was the playground of the good and great of English society. T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, was a family friend and Highclere visitor; Lady Almina provides an interesting perspective on some of the events described in Hero, particularly in relation to the partitioning of the Middle East. Lady A's husband and brother-in-law were well-regarded experts on the Middle East and their despair at the broken promises of self-government and nationhood are as palpable as those of Lawrence in Hero. 

Although the reader is treated to plenty of grand spectacles, especially early in the book (after all, Almina reigned as Countess for nearly twenty years before World War I), Lady Almina does not shy away from the horrors of the Great War. Many of the passages surrounding the war itself, particularly the battle of Gallipoli, rival the intensity of the descriptions in The Beauty and the Sorrow (still the best, most complete book I have read on World War I).

The Countess of Carnarvon does an exquisite job of illuminating a bygone era and anyone with even a passing interest in late Victorian, Edwardian, or World War I history should find it fascinating - to say nothing of Downton Abbey fans. Lady Almina seems to have been quite a character and one can only imagine that she would highly approve of her literary reincarnation.

Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court

A few years ago, when I worked at the Johns Hopkins SAIS campus, I had the opportunity to hear Sandra Day O'Connor speak. I remember that she spoke well and that she was interesting, but I don't actually remember any of the actual content of her speech - not even the general topic. Out of Order, which was written by Justice O'Connor, strikes me in the same way. Don't get me wrong: I have long admired Sandra Day O'Connor and I was eager to read this book. So. As one should expect from a former Supreme Court justice, Out of Order is well-written, but in the same way that a legal brief or (tiresome) graduate thesis might be. It is also entirely forgettable. Essentially, the organization is there, there are a few glimmering bits that could stand to be fleshed out a bit more, and the main ideas are hammered home until the reader can repeat them by heart.

So what are the main ideas? In the early years, it was terrible to be a Supreme Court justice. You had to ride circuit, sometimes ten thousand miles or more in a year, and often didn't have a proper bed to sleep in, to say nothing of a courtroom to command. It was better to serve on a state court than the highest court, and more than one man left to do so. Also, while most of our justices have been good and honorable men (O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the Court), a few were real cads. Despite the title, though, this isn't really a book about men behaving badly. At only 166 pages, disappointingly brief, it's hardly a book about much.

O'Connor does offer a few glimpses of the Court's more colorful characters - all long, long dead, of course. These were the glimmering bits that left me wishing for more, for the two or three pages that she devoted to these personalities, whom she essentially deemed the most intriguing men to serve on the Court in 200 years - for better or for worse - made me think that either the others have all been dry as chalk or, frankly, that she shouldn't have even bothered to travel this path. There's always the chance that it's both. In the end, I felt rather O'Connor could have done better. As I read this, I was reminded of a dissertation that no one wanted to write, but that needed to be written to quiet a badgering adviser. There is little to read here and less joy.

Detroit: An American Autopsy

Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff is a fascinating and incredibly disturbing look at the dysfunction that is Detroit. Living in Michigan, I already had a pretty good sense of how broken - and broke - the city is. After all, the city made news several yeas ago by asking schoolchildren to bring their own toilet paper to school, since the district couldn't afford it anymore. And then there is the Kwame Kilpatrick sideshow: enough said. For anyone who hasn't become familiar with the downfall of one of the nation's formerly great cities, LeDuff does a great job of breaking down the problems that have plagued the city since...the 70s? The 60s? The 1860s? Obviously there's no shortage of material here.

All-in-all, I thought the first half of the book was stronger than the second, which delves more into LeDuff's personal history and feels more like a memoir than an exposé. This is a pretty quick read and well worth the time for anyone who wants to begin to understand how so much can go so wrong and whether the same thing might happen to other great cities down the road.

Winter Games

I read about Winter Games by Rachel Johnson months ago, in a British article that also referenced Debs at War. For some reason, I thought Winter Games was also non-fiction, so I was rather surprised when I realized I'd embarked upon a fiction read instead. So. Winter Games was inspired by the author's grandmother's time in Germany in the 1930s, where all the best British families sent their daughters to be finished in the years between the wars. The Kaiser was, after all, Queen Victoria's grandson, so surely the Germans couldn't be all bad. Or so the thinking went.

The book is essentially two stories. The first,which is told in the first person voice of 18-year-old Daphne Linden, is the story of two British girls (Daphne and her best friend, Betsy) who are sent to Germany to hone their German skills and cavort with the aristocracy, British and German alike, in 1936. The second, told in the voice of Francie Fitzsimon, is the story of Francie's 2006 quest to uncover what, exactly, happened to her grandmother - Daphne - in those German months.

The stories are carefully intertwined, though until the end, Daphne's story clearly carries the novel. Daphne's story is rich in historical interest and detail, rich conversation, and characters who, if not fully developed, are at least sympathetic and believable. Francie, on the other hand, struck me as an insipid twit whom I might strangle if I met in real life. (She had way too much in common with the protagonist from The Spoiler for my liking.) Francie carries on - and on - about whether to have an affair with her boss, her latest internet purchases, and the quality of the espresso various machines produce. She is irritating and I only grudgingly warmed to her - slightly, only so slightly - in the last chapter. I would have skipped her chapters entirely, except that it is so artfully woven into Daphne's as the book progresses that to do so would have been impossible.

At it's heart, Winter Games is a good mystery as much as anything, though it took a rather darker turn than I would have expected, or liked (and which I certainly hope did not figure into Johnson's grandmother's own stories). It's a quick read, and yet one more perspective on Nazi Germany that left me scratching my head at how the world could be so willfully blind for so long. In the end, I liked the book more than I expected and was glad I'd soldiered on after realizing it wasn't quite what I expected.