Fatal Fever ~ Book Give-Away & Author Interview

Last Monday I introduced Gail Jarrow's newest book, Fatal Fever (Calkins Creek, 2015). Since then, I've had a chance to sit down and talk with Gail about writing Fatal Fever. And you still have a chance to win a copy ~ just leave a comment.

Sally: What inspired you to write about Typhoid fever?

Gail: When I was researching Red Madness (about Pellagra), I read a lot of public health bulletins. I kept seeing mentions of typhoid fever - which was happening at the same time. I'd heard about Typhoid Mary, but didn't know much about her, so I decided to investigate. Then, as I began doing the research I discovered links between the people tracking down Mary and my town of Ithaca, NY, which also suffered an outbreak of typhoid fever. Learning about the people - Mary and the scientists tracking her - gave me a connection to this story.

Sally: This book is packed with information. Talk about your research.

Gail: Because residents in Ithaca - and students at Cornell University - contracted typhoid fever, I found a lot of interesting information in Cornell's rare manuscript collection. There were some student scrapbooks from 1903 filled with news articles, and letters. Then, when I looked at George Soper's book (Soper was a sanitary engineer) I noticed that there were photos of the village just a couple miles from my house. I didn't visit the island that Mary was confined to - it's closed to the public - but I could gain a lot of information from photos. When you go back to those places (in aerial photos), they don't look like they did 100 years ago.

Sally: Mary was quarantined for the remainder of her life. Can you talk about individual rights within the context of a community's right to protect the health of its citizens?

Gail: These issues have not gone away, especially when you have no cure for a disease that can kill so many people. We got a sense of this with Ebola. If people get Ebola, they can die. So the question is: do you isolate people who are sick? And do you quarantine people who have been exposed? Back during the typhoid epidemic people were just beginning to understand that some people could be carriers of a disease but not show symptoms. The medical community erred on the side of caution. Today, we have a rise in tuberculosis, with antibiotic-resistant strains. So we're facing similar questions: do you want someone serving food or working with you who could pass on tuberculosis?
Mary was isolated because she refused to comply with medical directives and kept cooking and serving food. Today, state and federal governments have the authority to isolate people with tuberculosis who refuse to take their medications.

Sally: This is your second book on disease. What's next?

Gail: I'm working on my last book in what I call my "deadly diseases" trilogy. It's about bubonic plague. Interestingly, all three books take place at the turn of the century - in the very first years of 1900 - right after they discovered germ theory but hadn't yet discovered antibiotics.

Sally: Thank you for sharing your insights with us. You can check out Gail's website here.

Book Giveaway Rules: leave a comment. also - please send me an email to sueheaven[at]gmail[dot]com so I can contact you if I draw your name. (If I can't contact you, I can't send you a book!) Giveaway ends on Friday is only for US addresses.

Today we're joining the roundup over at the Nonfiction Monday blog where you'll find even more book reviews. It's also Marvelous Middle Grade Monday and we're hanging out with other MMGM bloggers over at Shannon Messenger's blog. Hop over to see what other people are reading. 

You Nest Here With Me

You Nest Here With Me
by Jane Yolen & Heidi Stemple; illus. by Melissa Sweet
32 pages; ages 4-8
Boyds Mills Press, 2015

theme: bedtime, family, home, nature




Pigeons nest on concrete ledges,
Catbirds nest in greening hedges,
Tiny wrens, in shoreline sedges.
You nest here with me.

From grackles to eagles, plovers to killdeer, Yolen and Stemple describe different places that birds nest in spot-on rhyme. They end each stanza: "You nest here with me". Combine that with Sweet's gorgeous illustrations and you've got a book that you'll want to read every night.

What I like LOVE about this book: let me count the ways:

• The birds ~ such a diversity of species and nest types
• Introduction of new words: tor
• Diversity of habitat
• Unlovely birds ~ cowbirds, for example
• Repetition ~ You nest here with me
• A feeling of safety 
• Spot-on illustrations
• Texture~ you can almost feel the twigs
• Vibrant color
• Collage
• Back matter! (everyone knows I love back matter)

Beyond the book activities: Build a bird nest. Go outside and gather materials that you think a bird might use in making a nest. You might find twigs,dead grass, fur or feathers, mosses, lichens, pine needles, and mud. Now try constructing a nest. How does it compare to the real thing? Find out by...

... going outside on a nest hunt. Take your journal and a camera along, because you might want to take some photos of how birds have built their nests - and jot notes about what you discover. This time of year you're likely to find old nests, unless you live where birds have already started their spring construction projects. Take a good look at where the nests are placed. Will they be well-hidden when leaves cover the trees? How high are they from the ground? And are the birds using all natural materials? Or have they incorporated bits of man-made stuff?

Help your backyard and neighborhood birds out. Give them some nesting materials - but choose things that are natural and degrade (not plastic or foil). Drape bits of string, thread, yarn, or natural fiber fabric over trees and shrubs. Or loosely fill a suet cage with strips of newspaper, broom bristles, mop strings and other natural things that could be used for a nest. Then hang it where birds will find it.


Today's review is part of the STEM Friday roundup. Drop by STEM Friday blog for more science books and resources. We're also joining PPBF (perfect picture book Friday), an event in which bloggers share great picture books at Susanna Leonard Hill's site. She keeps an ever-growing list of Perfect Picture Books.  Review copy from the publisher.

Fatal Fever: Tracking Down Typhoid Mary & Book Give-Away

Book Giveaway - see end of post

Fatal Fever ~ Tracking Down Typhoid Mary
by Gail Jarrow
192 pages; ages 10 & up
Calkins Creek, 2015

I love a good mystery - especially when it's true. And this is a mystery. A medical mystery. It involves villains (germs) and disease detectives, victims and suspects.

I love how it begins:

Early on a damp March morning in 1907, Mary Mallon answered the knock at the servant's entrance of a New York brownstone house. She took one look at the visitors and lunged at them with her sharp fork. As they flinched, she ran toward the kitchen.

 Mary hides in a closet. What she doesn't know is that inside of her there are billions of deadly microorganisms hiding, too. They are typhoid bacteria.

What we learn about Mary is that she is, by some fluke of nature, a typhoid carrier. She's never had symptoms of the disease, and so can't believe that she carries the germs inside her.

We meet the detectives: doctors, scientists, and public health officials trying to stop the spread of this deadly disease. "In 1900," writes Jarrow, "it struck nearly 400,000 Americans, and more than 35,000 died." It ranked with influenza, tuberculosis, and pneumonia up there in the top five fatal infectious diseases.

At the turn of the last century, nobody understood how typhoid was spread or where it came from. But they did know that it could be passed from one person to the next. College students died. Parents died. Entire families got sick. People were scared. How could they control the spread of this disease? One solution: quarantine sick people. Isolate them so they don't contaminate others. But how do you do that when they run and hide? And is it possible to keep these people out of your community?

Another solution: find out how the disease is spread and address environmental issues such as sewage and water.

And another solution: try to create immunity before the disease takes hold.

One of the tales Jarrow tells is about a wealthy family in Oyster Bay. Here's Radio Lab's take on the event.

Except in cases of disaster, we rarely see typhoid. On the other hand, we do have a new highly infectious disease spreading rampantly from person to person: Ebola. Reading Jarrow's book you see connections between the 1900 typhoid epidemic and our current need for better public health control of Ebola - not to mention the flu, SARS, measles, and other diseases.

You can find out more about Jarrow and her books at her website. She seems to be working up a series on "deadly diseases".... And check out another review of this book over at Abby the Librarian.

 Today we're joining the roundup over at the Nonfiction Monday blog where you'll find even more book reviews.

It's also Marvelous Middle Grade Monday and we're hanging out with other MMGM bloggers over at Shannon Messenger's blog. Hop over to see what other people are reading.  

Book Giveaway This is such a great book that I want to pass on my nearly-new copy ~ so leave a comment and I'll choose a winner sometime next week.  Review copy provided by publisher.