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In Print

Jonathan B. Tucker '75
Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox
Atlantic Monthly Press, $26

Ever since Robert Stevens died in early October from the inhaled form of anthrax, the nation has had to contend with the chilling reality of bioterrorism. But this dreaded disease is hardly the only weapon in the terrorist arsenal, and in a perhaps prescient book, Jonathan Tucker, an expert in biological warfare, presents the story of humankind’s “greatest scourge”—smallpox.

First mentioned in Egyptian writings around 3700 BCE, the virus-caused ailment, which is often fatal, “had a major impact on the history of the ancient world,” says Tucker, noting that when it found its way to the New World, the effect on a native population that had never known the disease was especially deadly. “Smallpox was a democratic scourge, afflicting people of every race, class, and social position.”

But in about 1000 BCE in India, someone, after observing that people who survived smallpox acquired permanent immunity to it, attempted to prevent the disease by deliberately inoculating volunteers with material gleaned from the pustules that characterized the ailment. This risky procedure, known as variolation, would eventually be practiced in many parts of the world, and an experiment to improve it led Edward Jenner to develop a safer, more effective vaccine in the late 1700s.

Tucker’s account of the history of vaccination and how the vaccine, in the days before refrigeration, was kept viable by transferring it arm-to-arm, is fascinating reading. The story of the concerted effort by the World Health Organization to eradicate smallpox from the planet—the disease was officially declared conquered in 1980—is often cited as one of the greatest achievements of public health.

But there is a dark side to the tale. In the 1760s the British used smallpox against American Indians, giving them infected blankets and triggering a deliberate epidemic. Many experts consider the virus to be too dangerous to deploy on the battlefield, but Tucker reveals the extent to which scientists in the then-Soviet Union developed it into the ultimate doomsday weapon.

Researchers and diplomats are currently debating the wisdom of destroying the last-known stocks of the virus in U.S. and Russian repositories, even as recent events have prompted officials here to consider a new effort to vaccinate a population whose immunity to the disease has vanished. “The risk of a deliberate reintroduction of smallpox remains quite low,” notes Tucker, “but it is not zero.”

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Joanne B. Freeman, Assistant Professor of History
Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic
Yale University Press, $29.95

The rough-and-tumble events that dogged Bill Clinton during his terms in office had many observers bemoaning the fact that politics had become a contact sport. But as historian Joanne Freeman points out in this revealing look at the way the game was played in the early days of the United States, politics was never genteel.

As an example, she recounts a mob scene in New York City on July 18, 1795 when citizens protesting a treaty between Great Britain and the U.S. so angered Alexander Hamilton, who had already been hit in the head with a rock, that he issued challenges to two rivals to meet for duels. “Hissings, coughings, hootings, strong words, clenched fists, and the threat of gunplay: this story displays America’s founders as real people caught up in the heat of the moment on a summer afternoon,” she says.

Freeman has mined archival material to piece together the role of a code of honor that often drove politics and political leaders. “I discovered what I came to call the 'ouch factor': the wake of pain and outrage provoked by the passage of political gossip,” she says. “Follow the path of outrage, and you reconstruct national networks of political friends and enemies.”

The war of words, both spoken and issued through broadsides, could escalate into a duel with pistols—a challenge that cost Hamilton his life at the hands of Aaron Burr. The fact that Clinton and Ken Starr did not take up arms shows that the political landscape has changed a bit.

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Andrew Solomon ’85
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Scribner, $28

Everyone gets the blues at one time or another, but according to modern researchers, about 19 million Americans suffer from chronic depression. This serious mental illness, says the author, “can be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals. a tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth.”

Solomon uses his successful battle with “the noonday demon”—the Psalmist’s term for melancholia—as the starting point for a comprehensive exploration of the origin, treatment, history, sociology, politics, and evolution of depression. The book profiles sufferers around the world and examines the many treatments that have been developed, from the admonition of Hippocrates to take mandrake to deal with an excess of black bile to today’s electroconvulsive, drug, and talking therapies.

“We do not really know what causes depression,” says Solomon. “We do not really know why certain treatments may be effective for depression.”

It has clearly been part of the human condition for a long time and, argues Solomon, it will continue to haunt our species for the foreseeable future. “Depression is the flaw in love,” he says. “To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.” There may be no cure, but fortunately, these days, there’s hope, or, at least, Prozac.

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Brief Reviews

Peter Gay, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History
Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914
W.W. Norton, $27.95

In making his case that sexually emboldened Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler was a better symbol of the 19th century than corseted Queen Victoria, historian Gay asserts that the Victorians were not very Victorian.

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Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Avalon Professor of the History of Medicine
Meselson, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA: A History of “The Most Beautiful Experiment in Biology"
Yale University Press, $40

Watson and Crick proposed the double helix structure of DNA; Meselson and Stahl confirmed it.

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Adam Lewis '72MFA
Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined Twentieth-Century Taste and Style
Viking, $39.95

Widely regarded as the father of 20th-century American design, Van Day Truex transformed the Parsons School of Design and Tiffany and Company into trendsetters that defined style and grace.

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Eric L. Muller '87JD
Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II
University of Chicago Press, $27.50

During the Second World War, Japanese Americans were not only stripped of their rights as citizens and forced into internment camps, they were also drafted into the Army. Law professor Muller tells how some resisted.

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Richard S. Tedlow '69
Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built
HarperCollins, $30

A Harvard Business School professor examines the impact of Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Thomas J. Watson Sr., Charles Revson, Sam Walton, and Robert Noyce.

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Harry Toland '44
A Sort of Peace Corps: Wilfred Grenfell’s Labrador Volunteers
Heritage Books, $21.50

In 1892, English surgeon Wilfred Grenfell began a medical mission in Newfoundland and Labrador. Toland, a Grenfell volunteer in 1931, recounts the story of America’s first major overseas volunteer movement.

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More Books by Yale Authors

Elizabeth Ballantine 1971, 1986PhD, and Stephen S. Lash 1962
A Vision of Paradise: Robertson Ward and the Mill Reef Club
Derrydale Press, $50

Harold Bloom 1956PhD, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Editor
Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages
Scribner, $27.50

Paul F. Boller Jr. 1939
Presidential Inaugurations
Harcourt Brace, $25

Gerald Cohen 1982
Come Before God with Joyous Song
Oxford University Press, $22.95

Frederick Crews 1955
Postmodern Pooh
North Point Press, $22

Peter D'Epiro 1981PhD and Mary Desmond Pinkowish 1982MPH
Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World
Anchor Books/Random House, $14

Roger Ferlo 1979PhD
Sensing God: Reading Scripture with All Our Senses
Cowley Publications, $8.95

Rena Fraden 1977, 1983PhD
Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women
University of North Carolina Press, $39.95

Jessica Helfand 1982, 1989MFA
Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture
Princeton Architectural Press, $45

Clarence Hotchkiss 1950
The Whipmaker’s Son: A Novel
CeShore Press, $14.95

R. S. Howe Jr. 1950
Reflections in Verse
Self-published, $15

John Klein 1975
Matisse Portraits
Yale University Press, $55

William L. Krinsky 1967, Associate Clinical Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, and Michael K. Oliver 1984PhD
Ground Beetles of Connecticut (Coleoptera: Carabidae, excluding Cicindelini)—An Annotated Checklist
Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, $25.95

James N. McCutcheon 1950
Preaching for the American Century
Ramz Publishing, $13.95

James Meyer 1984
Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties
Yale University Press, $50

Char Miller
Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism
Island Press/Shearwater Books, $28

Keith Steiner 1950
Hawai'i’s Early Territorial Days, Viewed from Vintage Postcards by Island Curio
Mutual Publishing, $25.95

Shelby Tucker 1957
Burma: The Curse of Independence
Pluto Press, $19.95

Jeff Wheelwright 1969
The Irritable Heart: The Medical History of the Gulf War
W.W. Norton, $26.95

William Wroth 1960, Editor
Ute Indian Arts and Culture: From Prehistory to the New Millennium
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, $85

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