There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He notes that metropolises in developing countries face enormous public-health problems, and he worries about terrorists armed with weaponized viruses and/or nuclear weapons.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. He devotes the final 70 pages to a paean to cities and an assessment of the principal threats to their continuation. In addition to telling the story of the outbreak, Johnson offers mini-lessons on related topics: how cholera kills, how Victorian London dealt with its messes, how and why people cling to false theories.

Science, not superstition, battled a disease, and in the ensuing years, public officials took steps to prevent another outbreak by building the vast sewer system that continues to function in London. Snow’s map charting the dimensions of the outbreak, avers Johnson, did not have an immediate effect (other than convincing officials to remove the pump handle, a decision that saved hundreds, maybe thousands), but it has had an enduring one. Snow and “affable clergyman” Henry Whitehead walked the streets, first independently and then in concert, to determine who was dying, who was surviving-and where. It was the waste from a single infected infant, however, that got into the water supply near the popular Broad Street pump in Soho and empowered Vibrio cholerae to kill hundreds. As Johnson ( Everything Bad Is Good for You, 2005, etc.) ably shows, London in 1854 was indeed a stinky city containing much fecal matter from people and animals, as well as waste from manufacturers. John Snow presented to skeptical public-health officials, who were committed to the prevailing, centuries-old theory that foul odors carry disease. An intrepid doctor and an enlightened minister pursue a cholera outbreak to its lair in 1850s London.

Book the ghost map