Black Death at the Golden Gate

April 1, 2019
Journalist Randall (The King and Queen of Malibu) delivers a fast-paced and well-researched narrative about the efforts to eradicate bubonic plague from San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. The disease claimed its first victim in Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King in 1900 and then established itself over the next several years, threatening the entire country. Randall vividly recounts the efforts of Dr. Joseph Kinyoun, surgeon of the Marine Hospital Service and the city’s chief quarantine officer, and his replacement, Dr. Rupert Blue, to overcome corrupt politics, inaccurate journalism, and a disregard for Yersina pestis (the bacterium that causes plague) to convince state and local officials of the danger. Unlike his thwarted predecessor, Blue established ties to Chinatown, where the plague first appeared, and hired a Chinese interpreter who brought more cases of plague to his attention. When Blue focused on catching the flea-infested rats that surged through the district, rather than assuming the inhabitants were to blame, he succeeded in temporarily halting the disease’s spread. After the Great Earthquake of 1906, the plague flared up in other neighborhoods, this time mainly infecting white victims, and Blue’s extensive rat extermination program was successful again. Underscoring how prejudice, complacency, and willful ignorance can be as dangerous to public health as bacteria, Randall spins an action-packed and stirring tale.

April 1, 2019
A complex tale of medicine, politics, race, and public health. Reuters senior reporter Randall (The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise, 2016, etc.) works his way through a story that is well-documented in the epidemiological literature but hasn't received much popular attention. At the end of 1899, bubonic plague broke out in Honolulu, with an unknown number of deaths and panic in its wake. Public health officials on the mainland knew that San Francisco was likely next, and they mounted a campaign of quarantine. Even so, crowded Chinatown, in the heart of the city, saw the first cases. A dilemma followed, with Marine Health Service bureau chief Joseph Kinyoun wrestling with whether to cordon off the area; writes Randall, "any harsh measures that might scare those living in the plague zone into fleeing outside the district would potentially expand the grip of the disease further." Working against Kinyoun were California's governor and San Francisco's mayor, who alternately denied the existence of the outbreak or demanded that it be hushed up, and even members of the Chinese community, who sued to end the quarantine when a plague had not been officially declared. Racism and corruption played their parts. In the end, Kinyoun was replaced with another public health officer, Rupert Blue, who, also against much opposition, was more successful in his campaign of "eliminating hundreds of thousands of rats from the streets and sewers." Chaos returned with the great earthquake that struck the city, and Blue, who ran into trouble with his bosses in Washington, was assigned elsewhere only to return to Randall's narrative decades later in Los Angeles, where plague had appeared. There are many moving parts to the story, and they don't always mesh neatly, but the author does good work in revealing the clamorous crash of public and private interests surrounding the outbreak--and, he notes, the bubonic plague still pops up from time to time in the U.S. A tale that resonates with the outbreak of measles, mumps, and other supposedly contained epidemics today.

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May 1, 2019

Reuters senior reporter Randall (Dreamland; The King and Queen of Malibu) presents a little-known aspect of California history. In 1899, Chinese immigrants crowded into a corner of San Francisco's Chinatown were dying of a strange disease. Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun (1860-1919), a brilliant scientist who lacked social skills and had been banished to San Francisco by an envious boss, used his expertise in the new science of bacteriology to identify the illness as bubonic plague. At that time, no treatment existed. Finding a way to avoid an epidemic was a necessity, but racism, belief in pseudoscientific theories, and politics were major stumbling blocks. Kinyoun stood alone in his fight while politicians and the head of the Chinese Six Companies, more concerned about economics than public health, sued him for attempting a quarantine. It would take years for his successor, Dr. Rupert Blue (1868-1948), and his team to discover the role of rats and fleas in spreading the disease. VERDICT A wonderful page-turner featuring pioneering epidemiologists instead of spies, this is sure to please readers interested in the history of medicine and science. [See Prepub Alert, 12/6/18.]--Barbara Bibel, formerly Oakland P.L.

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April 15, 2019
Every year, when someone gets the bubonic plague, we're surprised that this medieval-sounding disease still dwells among us. In this fast-paced history, journalist Randall (The King and Queen of Malibu, 2016) explains how the plague became a hazard in the continental U.S. When it arrived in San Francisco around 1900, physicians from the Marine Health Service (now the U.S. Public Health Service) labored to prevent a major epidemic at a time when science was just beginning to understand the behavior of the Y. pestis bacterium. They eventually found the links between plague, rats, and fleas (although not until after the fleas had infected a reservoir of wild rodents, where the plague remains today). But their progress was slowed by virulent anti-Asian racism that initially linked the disease with Chinese immigrants and by the public opposition of politicians and business leaders who vilified the doctors, undermined their efforts, and even claimed that the plague was a fake. This story of an epidemic that wasn't is a gripping historical mystery and a key cautionary tale for our own time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)