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

12 reviews

sherbertwells's review against another edition

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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)
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lezzieborden's review against another edition

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informative slow-paced

3.75

Pretty good, interesting look into a specific moment in medical history. As it was written in 2006, the last chapter, where the author discusses modern technology’s potential in public health, is very outdated, and his comparisons of Victorian London to the 21st century are similarly 15 years out of date (insisting that you can’t even imagine how they would have felt as an epidemic became part of everyday life, with rumors and misinformation and an alternating numbness and anxiety— unfortunately, Steven, I can imagine). That said, the passage of time isn’t his fault, and the human story of Dr. Snow and the reverend still holds up and is well-written. 
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