October 1, 2022
In The Long Reckoning, award-winning investigative journalist Black (The Good Neighbor) chronicles the efforts of U.S. veterans, scientists, and pacifists and their Vietnamese partners to compel the U.S. government to acknowledge the ongoing damage done by unexploded munitions and the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, particularly in the demilitarized zone. From notable U.S.-based Dutch writer/editor Buruma (The Churchill Complex), The Collaborators examines three figures seen as either heroes or traitors during World War II: Hasidic Jew Friedrich Weinreb, who took money to save fellow Jews but betrayed some of them to the Gestapo; Manchu princess Kawashima Yoshiko, who spied for the Japanese secret police in China; and masseur Felix Kersten, who claimed to have talked Himmler out of killing thousands. Oxford associate professor Healey's The Blazing World portrays 17th-century England as a turbulent society undergoing revolutionary change. A professor of politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London, Kennedy argues in Pathogenesis that it was not human guts and ingenuity but the power of disease-delivering microbes that has driven human history, from the end of the Neanderthals to the rise of Christianity and Islam to the deadly consequences of European colonialism (75,000-copy first printing). Continuing in the vein of his New York Times best-selling The Princess Spy, Loftis introduces us to Corrie ten Boom, The Watchmaker's Daughter, who helped her family hide Jews and refugees from the Gestapo during World War II (100,000-copy first printing). Mar's Seventy Times Seven chronicles Black 15-year-old Paula Cooper's murder of septuagenarian white woman Ruth Pelke in a violent home invasion in 1985 Gary, IN; her subsequent death sentence; and what happened when Pelke's grandson forgave her. Journalist/consultant Roberts fully reveals the Untold Power of Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, who effectively acted as president when her husband was incapacitated. A best seller in the UK when it was published in 2021, Sanghera's Empireland--an exploration of the legacy of British imperialism in the contemporary world--has been contextualized for U.S. audiences and carries an introduction by Marlon James. In Benjamin Banneker and Us, Webster explores the life of her forbear, the Black mathematician and almanac writer who surveyed Washington, DC, for Thomas Jefferson, and his descendants to highlight how structural racism continues to shape our understanding of lineage and family.
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Starred review from January 23, 2023
Revisiting the theme of William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976), sociologist and public health scholar Kennedy debuts with a virtuoso analysis of the fallout from encounters between deadly viral and bacterial pathogens and human populations that lacked immunity. Looking back to prehistory, he argues that Homo sapiens supplanted Eurasian Neanderthals 40,000 years ago by virtue of pathogens they brought from Africa, not superior intelligence. Elsewhere, he contends that epidemics depopulated the Roman Empire and led to the rise of Christianity and Islam, while the Black Death initiated Britain’s transition from feudalism to capitalism. A smallpox epidemic allowed Hernan Cortés to conquer the immunologically naive Aztec Empire in 1520, but Africa’s endemic malaria killed Europeans so quickly that they were unable to colonize the continent until quinine became available in the 19th century. And while modern sanitation and medicine have triumphed over cholera and other pathogens, Covid-19 highlighted the “stark inequalities” that still result in millions of poor and marginalized people dying each year from preventable infections. Though there’s a one-size-fits-all aspect to Kennedy’s thesis that disease-bearing microbes are responsible for the modern world, he marshals a wealth of surprising scholarship in lucid and succinct prose. The result is a fascinating look at history from the perspective of its tiniest protagonists. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House.
April 15, 2023
World history through the eyes of microbes. Bacteria may be microscopic and easy to disregard, writes Kennedy, a professor of politics and global health, but they're ubiquitous and astonishingly prolific--outweighing humankind, for one thing, by 1,000 times in terms of total mass. However, along with viruses, bacteria shape the fortunes of all life on Earth. It's hardly news that this includes the course of human history. In 1976, William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples made a strong case for the radically important role of disease in the rise and fall of civilizations and as a significant force in propelling innovation and warfare. Kennedy's book is in some ways redundant, but it is well grounded scientifically and draws on recent literature to examine, for instance, the effect of disease on the eventual hegemony of Homo sapiens over other early humans. If "for early humans, the Eastern Mediterranean region must have seemed like a cursed realm, the Paleolithic equivalent of Tolkien's Mordor," the arrival of human-borne pathogens into Neanderthal populations must have been even more deadly. Plagues in third-century Rome helped an obscure offshoot of Judaism gain supremacy over pantheistic religions whose gods, by allowing such calamities, were proven weak; without those murderous bacteria, Christianity might never have established itself. Kennedy charts the interaction of climate change with disease--the reappearance, for example, of the bubonic plague after a long absence as the Northern Hemisphere warmed and pest-bearing rodents proliferated, just in time for the Mongol Empire to spread the pandemic through its widespread raids--and he helps puzzle out a long-standing mystery concerning the Columbian conquests: "How do we explain the almost unilateral flow of pathogens from Europe to the Americas?" The answer is nuanced but reveals a great deal about how so many great Native American empires were so quickly subdued. Of interest to students of world history, with lessons to ponder for our own pandemic-hobbled time.
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