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Reviews tagging 'Excrement'
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
11 reviews
musicalpopcorn's review against another edition
challenging
informative
medium-paced
3.0
Chronicles the outbreak of cholera in 19th century London that ultimately led to a new scientific way of seeing disease.
The first two thirds of the book were very interesting. Learning about the cholera outbreak and how Snow traced it to the well, as well as the other facts was fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the brief description of the history of anesthetic.
The epilogue kind of threw me off a bit. It felt almost rambly, and I was struggling to connect all the talk about terrorism and nuclear attacks to cholera and Snow. It was interesting to listen to it post-Covid, given that the book was written well before the pandemic, but it was still very strange.
The first two thirds of the book were very interesting. Learning about the cholera outbreak and how Snow traced it to the well, as well as the other facts was fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the brief description of the history of anesthetic.
The epilogue kind of threw me off a bit. It felt almost rambly, and I was struggling to connect all the talk about terrorism and nuclear attacks to cholera and Snow. It was interesting to listen to it post-Covid, given that the book was written well before the pandemic, but it was still very strange.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug use, Medical content, Terminal illness, Death, Chronic illness, Pandemic/Epidemic, Vomit, and Excrement
ambaright's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Medical content, and Excrement
Moderate: Child death and Grief
elizafiedler's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
4.0
Very gross, but really fascinating and informative. Skip this one if you're sensitive to bodily fluids and descriptions of medical problems or trauma.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content, Medical trauma, Vomit, and Excrement
Moderate: Death
Minor: Body horror
the_true_monroe's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Child death, Death, Animal death, Medical content, Excrement, and Vomit
huntersrl's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
This was a fascinating dive into an important scientific development of which I had not known. It is well written, and weaves a clear picture of the events.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Excrement
megatza's review against another edition
challenging
dark
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
3.0
In the middle of the 19th century, cholera ravaged a dense few blocks of Soho, London. In the Victorian era, the disease moved quickly and unrelentingly, often causing death within mere days, if not hours. Steven Johnson builds an intriguing investigative narrative around the outbreak and the 19th century debate over its cause: infected water versus miasma. Of course, he’s using the lens of 21st century medicine to comb through archives, but the account is compelling, as is the medical debate and the state of public health policy and planning in the Victorian era.
But Johnson loses me in two places: the abiding connection to maps he insists on and the extrapolation of this research to 21st century urban disasters like nuclear terrorism. From a modern perspective, public health maps are a critical resource, of course. Unfortunately the last 2.5 years have taught us that maps are not everything if the virus is airborne and even quarantines and vaccines have their limits. (I’d be intrigued if anyone has seen anything from Johnson revisiting his epilogue in light of our recent experiences.) But obviously, a book published in 2006 is going to have a very different outlook on outbreaks than one published in 2022.
That said, Johnson absolutely lost me, and a full star, when he drifted into his discussion of Euro-centric contemporary urban planning as the pinnacle of human achievement and the risk of nuclear or bioterrorism. His arguments have some merit (but should be tempered with a healthy dose of post-colonialism and a more contemporary approach to urban planning as well as the consideration of racism as a public health crisis), but they felt wildly out of place as the bulk of two very long chapters following his compelling narrative of Victorian medicine.
“There is something profoundly enlightening about seeing these patterns of life and death laid out in cartographic form. …. When the next great epidemic does come, maps will be as crucial as vaccines in our fight against the disease. But again, the scale of the observation will have broadened considerably from a neighborhood to an entire planet.”
That all said, the first part was very interesting - and sets the tone for so many of the historical romances I read! - and I appreciated that this was out #PlagueNovelPals pick for June.
But Johnson loses me in two places: the abiding connection to maps he insists on and the extrapolation of this research to 21st century urban disasters like nuclear terrorism. From a modern perspective, public health maps are a critical resource, of course. Unfortunately the last 2.5 years have taught us that maps are not everything if the virus is airborne and even quarantines and vaccines have their limits. (I’d be intrigued if anyone has seen anything from Johnson revisiting his epilogue in light of our recent experiences.) But obviously, a book published in 2006 is going to have a very different outlook on outbreaks than one published in 2022.
That said, Johnson absolutely lost me, and a full star, when he drifted into his discussion of Euro-centric contemporary urban planning as the pinnacle of human achievement and the risk of nuclear or bioterrorism. His arguments have some merit (but should be tempered with a healthy dose of post-colonialism and a more contemporary approach to urban planning as well as the consideration of racism as a public health crisis), but they felt wildly out of place as the bulk of two very long chapters following his compelling narrative of Victorian medicine.
“There is something profoundly enlightening about seeing these patterns of life and death laid out in cartographic form. …. When the next great epidemic does come, maps will be as crucial as vaccines in our fight against the disease. But again, the scale of the observation will have broadened considerably from a neighborhood to an entire planet.”
That all said, the first part was very interesting - and sets the tone for so many of the historical romances I read! - and I appreciated that this was out #PlagueNovelPals pick for June.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Excrement, Child death, and Vomit
kalebdluca's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death, Excrement, Gaslighting, Grief, Gore, Medical content, Terminal illness, and Vomit
doitninetimes's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Excrement, Terminal illness, Medical content, Gore, and Death
Minor: Child death
sherbertwells's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
3.0
“This book is…a case study in how change happens in human society, the turbulent way in which wrong or ineffectual ideas are overthrown by better ones” (xv)
In my short career as a reviewer I have realized that nonfiction books are constrained by far more literary conventions than novels. Most nonfiction authors, unless they’re named Erik Larson, are obligated to reflect the truths presented by their research. They are encouraged to be more logical than thrifty in their prose. Depending on where writers fall on the spectrum of popular vs. academic nonfiction, they may be granted the privilege of embroidering “I” “we” or “you” into their work like a lady’s maid zhuzhing up a ballgown (or, depending on your perspective, a scarlet letter; writing popular nonfiction means surrendering the right to mock one’s critics in the work itself). Once an author has chosen their spot on that axis, the best they can do is to write a darn good book where they are, and leave it among the bulrushes in the hopes it will be discovered by a deserving colleague or an adoring public.
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson is a decent book, if you appreciate its package.
It is unapologetically popular nonfiction, a Victorian ballgown stuck through with colloquialism and first-person pronouns. For some people, this style is bewitching. For others, myself included, it’s a little off-putting. Sometimes Johnson feels like a gregarious tour guide trying to entertain a gaggle of museum-goers by quoting Engels and Dickens—you know Dickens, right? While I don’t quite know Dickens, I am a little disturbed by seeing his moralizing taken as the gospel truth.
Johnson himself occasionally lapses into the realm of the novelist, following the young clergymen Henry Whitehead on a fictitious stroll around Soho on page 25 or speculating on the origin of Dr. John Snow’s scholarly convictions on page 144. The Ghost Map is certainly more transparent about its literary liberties than Devil in the White City, but if the former were nudged even an inch toward the “academic” end of the spectrum its insertions would become inexcusable. “If we want to re-create the inner experience of the [1854 cholera] outbreak,” the author declares, “the historical record comes up wanting. We have to use our imaginations” (32).
I don’t think all the conventions of popular nonfiction are harmful. But I suspect that forcing The Ghost Map to conform to the historical bestseller novel, like promoting public health but emptying sewer water into the Thames, does more harm than good. Especially disappointing is the epilogue, “Broad Street Revisited.” Forced to tie his theses into the modern world, Johnson offers less of a practical plan for the next pandemic (it was published in 2006) than an unwieldy attempt to make his 200-page epic seem relevant. Such epilogues are completely unnecessary.
The Ghost Map is already relevant.
“You can tell the story of the Broad Street outbreak on the scale of a few hundred human lives, drinking water from a pump, getting sick and dying over a few weeks, but in telling the story that way, you limit its perspective, limit is ability to convey a fair account of what really happened, and, more important—why it happened. Once you get to why, the urban development, or the microscopic tight focus of bacteria life cycles. These are causes, too” (95-96)
The book’s message—that great puzzles are solved through the synthesis of the sociological and the microscopic, the expert and the amateur—is absolutely necessary and unexpectedly uncommon in the world of modern scholarship. It suits the 21st-century historian and the Victorian doctor alike. And Johnson justifies it by delivering The Ghost Map in an ingenious, self-conscious package.
Sometimes a reviewer gets so carried away with their own opinions that they forget to summarize the work they have chosen to write about. But I have postponed sharing the premise of The Ghost Map because I do not think I can do Johnson’s wonderful conceit justice. Yes, the book begins with soiled well on a Soho street sparking a cholera epidemic. Yes, it takes an exacting doctor and an observant curate to identify the cause. But Johnson tells this story on four tracks, sketching John Snow and Henry Whitehead alongside the “small, comma-shaped” cholera bacterium and the sprawling, fevered city of London (99).
What a conceit! Many history books run on similar engines, but none as self-consciously as The Ghost Map.
This book, which I don’t think is all that sublime, makes me realize how little I know as a reviewer. My assessments, upon reflection, become ridiculous. The logic of my love and hate unravels or snaps like cheap thread. I feel like a snob making babbling pronouncements form the bustled seat of my own ego, without even the legitimacy of a BA in English.
But the more I see and the more I learn, the closer my conclusions might come to something that resembles the truth. Which is what Johnson would have wanted anyway.
“The ghosts of the Broad Street outbreak were reassembled for one final portrait, reincarnated as black bars lining the streets of their devastated neighborhood. In dying, they had collectively made a pattern that itself pointed to a fundamental truth, though it took a trained hand to make that pattern visible” (197)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content and Excrement
Moderate: Death
Minor: Child death and Death of parent