Faculty Bibliography

Aside from the post-9/11 threat of bioterrorism, infectious disease is more of a seasonal annoyance to most Americans than a major threat. [...] . He's intimately familiar with the region, having served as a correspondent in South Asia during the devastating recent tsunamis. [...] his grasp of virology, as well as of the ins and outs of the world health bureaucracy, serves him well in explaining why medical practices that appear so obvious to Western experts in containing a deadly epidemic are largely irrelevant to "the backyard chicken farmers, cockfighters, witch doctors, political bosses, and poultry smugglers" who control the terrain where this battle must be fought

Aside from the post-9/11 threat of bioterrorism, infectious disease is more of a seasonal annoyance to most Americans than a major threat to their lives. [...] that is. He's intimately familiar with the region, having served as a correspondent in South Asia during the devastating recent tsunami. [...] his grasp of virology, as well as of the ins and outs of the world health bureaucracy, serves him well in explaining why medical practices that appear so obvious to Western experts in containing a deadly epidemic are largely irrelevant to "the backyard chicken farmers, cockfighters, witch doctors, political bosses, and poultry smugglers" who control the terrain where this battle must be fought

Ms. [Dorothea Lange]'s territory included all of California, which she covered by automobile. Driving north on Route 101 on a miserable winter's day, she passed a hand-lettered sign reading "Pea-Pickers Camp" near the town of Nipomo. Ms. Lange drove on for 20 miles, or about 32 kilometers, before something pulled her back. On the job for almost a year, she had come to understand the rhythms of migrant life, the periods of physically exhausting labor followed by even longer (unpaid) periods of emotionally draining inactivity. In the Nipomo camp, Ms. Lange met Florence Thompson, 32, the mother of 11 children, five born out of wedlock. The family was in desperate straits, living off stolen vegetables from the fields. Ms. Lange took a half-dozen photos, putting Ms. Thompson and her children in different poses. She took the photos from just outside their tent, even moving a pile of soiled laundry aside, so as not to embarrass the subjects by noting their squalid living conditions. (Though Ms. Gordon doesn't mention it, Ms. Lange may have decided to use only three of the children to avoid the public perception of "Okies" as irresponsible "white trash.") For the key photo, she "made the unusual decision to ask the two youngsters leaning on their mother to turn their faces away from the camera," Ms. Gordon writes. "She was building the drama and impact of the photograph by forcing the viewer to focus entirely on Florence Thompson's beauty and anxiety, and by letting the children's bodies, rather than their faces, express their dependence on their mother."

The motive for the bombing seemed apparent from the start. The Los Angeles Times was a "fiercely conservative" newspaper, [Howard Blum] says, and its publisher, Harrison Gray Otis, had vowed to turn Los Angeles into "a bustling, nonunion metropolis." Employing his army of detectives, [Billy Burns] traced the conspiracy, as well as other terrorist acts, to the Indianapolis headquarters of the Structural Iron Workers union and its secretary-treasurer, John J. McNamara, whose accomplices included his brother Jim. Business leaders praised Burns for saving capitalism from the clutches of working-class thuggery. But the union movement rushed to the McNamara brothers' defense. "I have investigated the whole case," said Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. "Burns has lied!" With aid from the growing Socialist Party, organized labor raised the war chest needed to give the McNamara brothers the finest defense. Enter [Clarence Darrow]

David Oshinsky reviews "American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century," a history of the explosion at the Los Angeles Times building on Oct 1, 1910 by Howard Blum