Membaca

Nonfiction Looking for the next epidemic PANDEMIC: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond By Sonia Shah 288 pp. Picador Reviewed by Lynne M. Hinkey From the bubonic plague to HIV/AIDS, contagious diseases have loomed large in human history, and influenced human evolution, behavior, and culture. They intrigue us in the way a train wreck does, leaving us wondering how it could happen and fearful lest it happen to us. But, surprisingly, most of us have very little understanding of how these diseases start, spread, or even factual information on how great – or small – a threat any one of these might be to us. We tend to overreact to distant, vague threats, like Ebola, but brush off as inconsequential the more familiar and likely threat of Lyme disease.  Pandemic explores the human health, economic, social, and even that specific psychological phenomenon of potentially deadly infectious disease. Using the well-documented and understood mechanisms of cholera’s spread as a...

Nonfiction Whiskey-voiced legend ... DICKEY CHAPELLE UNDER FIRE: Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action 136 pp. Wisconsin Historical Society Press By John Garofolo Reviewed by William C. Crawford Dickey Chapelle was a woman and an intrepid, pioneer combat photographer. In many important ways she was like the Marines that she often followed into battle. She had a nose for the images of war, but her work also captured the human side. She died in 1965 before Vietnam became a lost cause for American forces. A Marine patrol she joined hit a booby trap south of Chu Lai. Flying shrapnel severed her carotid artery. Legendary combat photographer Henri Huet caught a poignant image of a chaplain administering last rites to Chapelle on the battlefield. Huet and other well known photographers would themselves later perish in a helicopter shot down over Laos in the waning days of the War. Dickey proved herself as a war correspondent during the later years of Worl...

Nonfiction Fusing of psyches THE FUTURE TENSE OF JOY By Jessica Teich 277 pp. Picador Reviewed by Sue Ellis The Future Tense of Joy is an engaging account of author Jessica Teich’s long journey to emotional well being. She begins by describing her over-reaction to her eldest daughter’s bid for more personal freedom, how it brought up memories of herself at the same age. To a past, she writes, that would not stay put. At sixteen, Teich had been drawn into a secret and abusive relationship with a man at the dance studio where she took lessons. She never told anyone, and had never come to terms with what happened to her or the fact that her parents failed to protect her. Early on, Teich introduces a woman she refers to as Lacey, a stranger she read about and whose life, according to the obituary, nearly paralleled her own. Both women were highly educated, both Rhodes scholars, and both appeared to have the world by the tail. The following excerpt sums up Teich’s feelings about the simila...