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Reviews tagging 'Excrement'
The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks by Steven Johnson
11 reviews
musicalpopcorn's review against another edition
3.0
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.
Graphic: Drug use, Medical content, Terminal illness, Death, Chronic illness, Pandemic/Epidemic, Vomit, and Excrement
ambaright's review against another edition
4.5
Graphic: Death, Medical content, and Excrement
Moderate: Child death and Grief
elizafiedler's review against another edition
4.0
Graphic: Medical content, Medical trauma, Vomit, and Excrement
Moderate: Death
Minor: Body horror
the_true_monroe's review against another edition
4.0
Graphic: Death of parent, Child death, Death, Animal death, Medical content, Excrement, and Vomit
tesch18's review against another edition
Graphic: Excrement
huntersrl's review against another edition
5.0
Moderate: Excrement
megatza's review against another edition
3.0
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.
Graphic: Death, Excrement, Child death, and Vomit
kalebdluca's review against another edition
5.0
Graphic: Child death, Death, Excrement, Gaslighting, Grief, Gore, Medical content, Terminal illness, and Vomit
doitninetimes's review against another edition
4.0
Graphic: Excrement, Terminal illness, Medical content, Gore, and Death
Minor: Child death
sherbertwells's review against another edition
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)
“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 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)
Graphic: Medical content and Excrement
Moderate: Death
Minor: Child death and Death of parent