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(More customer reviews)The flowering of institutionalized corporate crime at the end of the 20th century is often so opaque and obscured, it is sometimes impossible to see in which of many the blind alleys and shadows the tracks of the culpable may reside. Early in the 20th century, however, the nefarious and their misdeeds were easier to illumine. In Ithaca, if we had to have plutocrats, the Tremans seemed benign enough, though no less haughty and imperious. Their name adorns bucolic state parks and beautiful marina lands. The mass murder that took place in Ithaca in 1903 - the instrument of which was an entirely avoidable typhoid epidemic - is traced in THE EPIDEMIC with pellucid clarity to a self-protecting cadre of Cornell administrators, patricians such as the Tremans, and a more basic kind of crook fueled by moneylust. Tales of crime are often reframed as mysteries, yet this one was replete with purple drama from the beginning, involving crooked deals of a upper class brotherhood, a broad pathos of needless deaths, the first unmasking of truths buried for nearly a hundred years, and a redefinition of the elements of social welfare. This book gallops along with the engaging and rhythmic pace of a Wilkie Collins crime or suspense novel, though the heart of the story has more in common with the dark malice of a tale by Poe.
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The dramatic account of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century struggle against a frightening disease-with lessons for todayThe Epidemic tells the story of how a vain and reckless businessman became responsible for a typhoid epidemic in 1903 that devastated Cornell University and the surrounding town of Ithaca, New York. Eighty-two people died, including twenty-nine Cornell students. Protected by influential friends, William T. Morris faced no retribution for this outrage. His legacy was a corporation-first known as Associated Gas & Electric Co. and later as General Public Utilities Corp.-that bedeviled America for a century. The Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 was its most notorious historical event, but hardly its only offense against the public interest.The Ithaca epidemic came at a time when engineers knew how to prevent typhoid outbreaks but physicians could not yet cure the disease. Both professions were helpless when it came to stopping a corporate executive who placed profit over the public health. Government was a concerned but helpless bystander. For modern-day readers acutely aware of the risk of a devastating global pandemic and of the dangers of unrestrained corporate power, The Epidemic provides a riveting look back at a heretofore little-known, frightening episode in America's past that seems all too familiar. Written in the tradition of The Devil in the White City, it is an utterly compelling, thoroughly researched work of narrative history with an edge.Praise for the author's previous book, Fire Underground "Enough bureaucratic villains to fill a Dickens novel." -New York Times Book Review "DeKok has not only reported and written a compelling first-hand account of how an underground fire destroyed Centralia, but he even gives us an anatomy of how the disaster happened and analyzes its implications for one community, and in a sense for all of us. A thoughtful and thoroughly engrossing read!" -Lisa Scottoline, author of Dirty Blonde, a fictional story about Centralia
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