The Barbary Plague

The Barbary Plague
Author: Marilyn Chase
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2004-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0375757082

The veteran Wall Street Journal science reporter Marilyn Chase’s fascinating account of an outbreak of bubonic plague in late Victorian San Francisco is a real-life thriller that resonates in today’s headlines. The Barbary Plague transports us to the Gold Rush boomtown in 1900, at the end of the city’s Gilded Age. With a deep understanding of the effects on public health of politics, race, and geography, Chase shows how one city triumphed over perhaps the most frightening and deadly of all scourges.

Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague

Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague
Author: David K. Randall
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393609464

“A mash-up of Erik Larson and Richard Preston.” —Tina Jordan, New York Times Book Review podcast On March 6, 1900, the bubonic plague took its first victim on American soil: Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown—but when corrupt politicians mounted a cover-up to obscure the threat, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save San Francisco, and the nation, from a gruesome fate. Black Death at the Golden Gate is a spine-chilling saga of virulent racism, human folly, and the ultimate triumph of scientific progress.

Everything She Touched

Everything She Touched
Author: Marilyn Chase
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1452174520

Everything She Touched recounts the incredible life of the American sculptor Ruth Asawa. This is the story of a woman who wielded imagination and hope in the face of intolerance and who transformed everything she touched into art. In this compelling biography, author Marilyn Chase brings Asawa's story to vivid life. She draws on Asawa's extensive archives and weaves together many voices—family, friends, teachers, and critics—to offer a complex and fascinating portrait of the artist. Born in California in 1926, Ruth Asawa grew from a farmer's daughter to a celebrated sculptor. She survived adolescence in the World War II Japanese-American internment camps and attended the groundbreaking art school at Black Mountain College. Asawa then went on to develop her signature hanging-wire sculptures, create iconic urban installations, revolutionize arts education in her adopted hometown of San Francisco, fight through lupus, and defy convention to nurture a multiracial family. • A richly visual volume with over 60 reproductions of Asawa's art and archival photos of her life (including portraits shot by her friend, the celebrated photographer Imogen Cunningham) • Documents Asawa's transformative touch—most notably by turning wire – the material of the internment camp fences – into sculptures • Author Marilyn Chase mined Asawa's letters, diaries, sketches, and photos and conducted interviews with those who knew her to tell this inspiring story. Ruth Asawa forged an unconventional path in everything she did—whether raising a multiracial family of six children, founding a high school dedicated to the arts, or pursuing her own practice independent of the New York art market. Her beloved fountains are now San Francisco icons, and her signature hanging-wire sculptures grace the MoMA, de Young, Getty, Whitney, and many more museums and galleries across America. • Ruth Asawa's remarkable life story offers inspiration to artists, art lovers, feminists, mothers, teachers, Asian Americans, history buffs, and anyone who loves a good underdog story. • A perfect gift for those interested in Asian American culture and history • Great for those who enjoyed Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel, Ruth Asawa: Life's Work by Tamara Schenkenberg, and Notes and Methods by Hilma af Klint

A Very Peculiar Plague

A Very Peculiar Plague
Author: Catherine Jinks
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1743431368

'Bogles ain't like pigeons. They don't travel in flocks. So why is this corner o' London crawling with 'em?' Eleven-year-old Jem Barbary spent most of his early life picking pockets for a canny old crook named Sarah Pickles. Now she's betrayed him, and Jem wants revenge. He also wants to work for bogler Alfred Bunce, who kills the child-eating monsters that lurk in the city's cellars and sewers. But Alfred is keen to give up bogling, since he almost lost his last apprentice, Birdie. When numerous children start disappearing around Newgate Prison, Alfred and Jem do join forces, waging an underground war. They even seek help from Birdie, dragging her away from the safe and comfortable home she's found with Miss Edith Eames. Together they learn that there's only one thing more terrifying than facing a whole plague of bogles - and that's facing some of the sinister people from Jem's past ...

Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues [2 volumes]
Author: Joseph P. Byrne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 917
Release: 2008-09-30
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1573569593

Editor Joseph P. Byrne, together with an advisory board of specialists and over 100 scholars, research scientists, and medical practitioners from 13 countries, has produced a uniquely interdisciplinary treatment of the ways in which diseases pestilence, and plagues have affected human life. From the Athenian flu pandemic to the Black Death to AIDS, this extensive two-volume set offers a sociocultural, historical, and medical look at infectious diseases and their place in human history from Neolithic times to the present. Nearly 300 entries cover individual diseases (such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, and SARS); major epidemics (such as the Black Death, 16th-century syphilis, cholera in the nineteenth century, and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19); environmental factors (such as ecology, travel, poverty, wealth, slavery, and war); and historical and cultural effects of disease (such as the relationship of Romanticism to Tuberculosis, the closing of London theaters during plague epidemics, and the effect of venereal disease on social reform). Primary source sidebars, over 70 illustrations, a glossary, and an extensive print and nonprint bibliography round out the work.

The Black Death

The Black Death
Author: John Aberth
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2005-03-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781403968029

A fascinating account of the phenomenon known as the Black Death, this volume offers a wealth of documentary material focused on the initial outbreak of the plague that ravaged the world in the 14th century. A comprehensive introduction that provides important background on the origins and spread of the plague is followed by nearly 50 documents organized into topical sections that focus on the origin and spread of the illness; the responses of medical practitioners; the societal and economic impact; religious responses; the flagellant movement and attacks on Jews provoked by the plague; and the artistic response. Each chapter has an introduction that summarizes the issues explored in the documents; headnotes to the documents provide additional background material. The book contains documents from many countries - including Muslim and Byzantine sources - to give students a variety of perspectives on this devastating illness and its consequences. The volume also includes illustrations, a chronology of the Black Death, and questions to consider.

Plague Ports

Plague Ports
Author: Myron Echenberg
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2007-01-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814722326

Publisher description

Plague

Plague
Author: Wendy Orent
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2013-07-02
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1451699212

Plague is a terrifying mystery. In the Middle Ages, it wiped out 40 million people -- 40 percent of the total population in Europe. Seven hundred years earlier, the Justinian Plague destroyed the Byzantine Empire and ushered in the Middle Ages. The plague of London in the seventeenth century killed more than 1,000 people a day. In the early twentieth century, plague again swept Asia, taking the lives of 12 million in India alone. Even more frightening is what it could do to us in the near future. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian scientists created genetically altered, antibiotic-resistant and vaccine-resistant strains of plague that can bypass the human immune system and spread directly from person to person. These weaponized strains still exist, and they could be replicated in almost any laboratory. Wendy Orent's Plague pieces together a fascinating and terrifying historical whodunit. Drawing on the latest research in labs around the world, along with extensive interviews with American and Soviet plague experts, Orent offers nothing less than a biography of a disease. Plague helped bring down the Roman Empire and close the Middle Ages; it has had a dramatic impact on our history, yet we still do not fully understand its own evolution. Orent's retelling of the four great pandemics makes for gripping reading and solves many puzzles. Why did some pandemics jump from person to person, while others relied on insects as carriers? Why are some strains more virulent than others? Orent reveals the key differences among rat-based, prairie dog-based, and marmot-based plague. The marmots of Central Asia, in particular, have long been hosts to the most virulent and frightening form of the disease, a form that can travel around the world in the blink of an eye. From its ability to hide out in the wild, only to spring back into humanity with a terrifying vengeance, to its elusive capacity to develop suddenly greater virulence and transmissibility, plague is a protean nightmare. To make matters worse, Orent's disturbing revelations about the former Soviet bioweapon programs suggest that the nightmare may not be over. Plague is chilling reading at the dawn of a new age of bioterrorism.

Chasing Secrets

Chasing Secrets
Author: Gennifer Choldenko
Publisher:
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2015
Genre: Chinese
ISBN: 0385742533

Thirteen-year-old Lizzie and her secret friend Noah, who's hiding in her house, plan to rescue Noah's father from the quarantined Chinatown and save everyone they love from contracting the plague that's spreading in 1900 San Francisco.

Bubonic Panic

Bubonic Panic
Author: Gail Jarrow
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2016-05-10
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1620917386

Uncover the true story of America's first plague epidemic in 1900 in this book is perfect to share with young readers looking for a historical perspective of the Covid-19/Coronavirus pandemic that recently gripped the world. In March 1900, San Francisco's health department investigated a strange and horrible death in Chinatown. A man had died of bubonic plague, one of the world's deadliest diseases. But how could that be possible? Acclaimed author and scientific expert Gail Jarrow brings the history of a medical mystery to life in vivid and exciting detail for young readers. She spotlights the public health doctors who desperately fought to end it, the political leaders who tried to keep it hidden, and the brave scientists who uncovered the plague's secrets. This title includes photographs and drawings, a glossary, a timeline, further resources, an author's note, and source notes.