Book Reviews
SCIENCE
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
By Laurie Garrett Farrar Straus & Giroux, 750 pgs., $25
Reviewed by Doug Hagley
Imagine a flu that kills 500,000 Americans in a few months; or an incurable highly contagious virus that makes blood pour from your body-even your eyes bleed-and 90 percent of the people infected die. Imagine a medical researcher, unaware he's carrying a deadly African virus, flying to London and brushing elbows with hundreds of people before he develops symptoms.
No need to imagine. These are onl two of the true stories documented by Laurie Garrett in "The Coming Plague." One had a happy ending: The scientist was isolated inside an Apollo space capsule and flown to the U.S. aboard a military jet. He was saved with blood serum from one of the few survivors of the virus.
Hundreds of emerging lethal viruses, HIV among them, aren't the only threats. Bacteria, too, are now way ahead of us. More bacteria live on a single square inch of human intestine than there are people on the entire planet, and they've been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. While we struggle to break genetic codes, bacteria are reengineering themselves to be resistant to antibiotics. They capture and rearrange DNA from other cells to acquire drug immunity, and then share that genetic advantage with other species of bacteria.
Drug resistant tuberculosis, dysentery, gonorrhea, pneumonia, a staph and strep infections are spreading, with no new antibiotics to stop them. Even ancient scourges like leprosy are resisting treatment. And one of the most likely places to ease is inside any major urban U.S. hospital.
There are TB epidemics right now in New York, Miami, and other U.S. cities. In 1993 over 400,000 people in Milwaukee became ill from a parasite in their drinking water, something to think about as Republicans seek to eliminate federal clean water mandates. In the Southwest, people were killed by a virus carried by deer mice, common throughout the U.S. Hundreds became ill and some died after eating fast-food hamburgers containing an intestinal bacteria. The list goes on.
And we are to blame. overpopulation and urbanization promote the spread of disease. The overuse of antibiotics in ourselves and our farm animals speeds up bacterial evolution. The destruction of rainforests and other natural habitats brings us into contact with deadly animal diseases that infect humans.
This is not a hopeful book, but the stories of scientific egos and heroes, political intrigues, and the ways in which biological mysteries are solved are addictive in their relentlessly frightening momentum. "The Coming Plague" is a must-read for its history of disease, its volume of information, and as an elucidation of our failed relationship with nature.
MYSTERY
Edsel
By Loren D. Estleman Mysterious Press, 29 pgs., $21.95
Reviewed by Jamie Agnew, Owner of Aunt Agatha's, a mystery and true crime book store.
The fifties are a decade not much dealt with in crime fiction. Until recently the typical American guy novel seemed mired in the private eye heyday of the forties-Chandler's "The Long Good-bye" came out in 1953 and it's been a lengthy exit for the noir, black and white postwar atmosphere his Marlowe embodied. The Fifties happened in technicolor, and it hasn't been until the last few years with Walter Mosley's "A Red Death," James Ellroy's "Dick Contino's Blues," and now Loren Estleman's "Edsel," we've had the 3-D fiction glasses to see it clearly.
"Edsel" draws the reader in immediately with the winning, wise ass voice of Connie Minor as he stands in front of the Detroit Hudson's watching his old nemesis Frankie Orr being ceremonially grilled by the Kefauver committee on TV. The narrator of Estleman's first Detroit novel "Whiskey River," Connie, returns forlornly grown old, faded from a with-it prohibition-era journalist to a has-been ad man. Suddenly and almost miraculously he's given another grab at society's brass ring when offered the chance to mastermind Henry Ford II's new auto-hype-hope the (you guessed it) Edsel. Once in the executive wing, however, he's not so gently persuaded into returning to his old investigative habits by Union boss Walter Reuther, who's still laboring to find out who took a shot at him.
The pressures shoot Connie through a fifties cross section of executives, mobsters, professional wrestlers, and anti-communist crusaders, allowing Estleman to dig beneath the Eisenhower era's smiling facade to expose the madness, violence, greed and sad triviality of America's then-emerging postwar national Culture, a culture forged in Detroit by Big Business, Big Labor, Big Crime and a little home appliance that reduced Uncle Miltie, Joe McCarthy and mushroom clouds to indifferent images on the Tele King. Like his last book "King of the Corner," "Edsel" doesn't end in the cliche shoot-out, but rather a more realistic closed door powerplay producing little real change. It's one of Estleman's strongest, jettisoning the macho mystery hero in favor of a very human protagonist facing his own mortality and hopelessness. Of course we all know the fate of the Edsel itself, but Estelman transcends the joke to make the failure of a car emblematic of the failure of one man, the failure of a country, and even the failure of a decade.