Typhoid Mary : An Urban Historical
Author:
Genres: Biographies & Memoirs, History, Medicine
Book Type: Hardcover
Author:
Genres: Biographies & Memoirs, History, Medicine
Book Type: Hardcover
This slim volume (148 pages) is a quick read (I started and finished during a 5 hour airline flight).
As other reviewers have pointed out, there are pages I skimmed and skipped because Bourdain didn't have a lot of material to work with (many details of Mary Mallon's life are lost to history) and thus filled the gaps with his customary over-the-top prose.
His style can be annoying at times, funny at others (but more annoying than funny). If you read Kitchen Confidential and remember his excessive use of colorful adjectives to describe vagabonds, scalawags, and the like, you'll certainly get your fill of them here. Example:
Chapter Two is simply titled "Typhoid Sucks."
-One sample sentence: "Popular objects of desire of the day were 'British Blondes', women who looked like the defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers."
-When Mary's stool samples positively identify her as a carrier of Typhoid, Bourdain writes: "Mary was now thoroughly and profoundly screwed."
In any case, getting past the hackish style, this is an interesting story, and I learned a lot more about Mary Mallon than I knew, but Bourdain still can't plug a lot of the gaps that will remain forever lost to history.
What we do know, is that she didn't kill the legions of people her name suggests. She was the "boogey woman" of the day, although not without reason (there were others far worse, at the same time).
That washing your hands is a really, really important thing.
That we are so fortunate to live in a time when medical advances help detect and treat these illnesses, and that we know about "carriers" who may not show symptoms and how to identify them and we don't ship carriers off to lonely islands to get rid of them.
That she brought a lot of this on herself by simply refusing to believe she was a carrier, and even if she didn't believe, by living so sloppy and with such disinterest and lack of self-respect (we already know from history that she died in absolute squalor with no reason at all for having done so) that she couldn't be bothered to wash her own feces off her hands when she cooked food. It's as simple as that.
And, as another reviewer pointed out, don't read this around supper time. You're going to be reading about feces and urine and squalor from page to page. Then you're going to wash your hands. A lot.
As other reviewers have pointed out, there are pages I skimmed and skipped because Bourdain didn't have a lot of material to work with (many details of Mary Mallon's life are lost to history) and thus filled the gaps with his customary over-the-top prose.
His style can be annoying at times, funny at others (but more annoying than funny). If you read Kitchen Confidential and remember his excessive use of colorful adjectives to describe vagabonds, scalawags, and the like, you'll certainly get your fill of them here. Example:
Chapter Two is simply titled "Typhoid Sucks."
-One sample sentence: "Popular objects of desire of the day were 'British Blondes', women who looked like the defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers."
-When Mary's stool samples positively identify her as a carrier of Typhoid, Bourdain writes: "Mary was now thoroughly and profoundly screwed."
In any case, getting past the hackish style, this is an interesting story, and I learned a lot more about Mary Mallon than I knew, but Bourdain still can't plug a lot of the gaps that will remain forever lost to history.
What we do know, is that she didn't kill the legions of people her name suggests. She was the "boogey woman" of the day, although not without reason (there were others far worse, at the same time).
That washing your hands is a really, really important thing.
That we are so fortunate to live in a time when medical advances help detect and treat these illnesses, and that we know about "carriers" who may not show symptoms and how to identify them and we don't ship carriers off to lonely islands to get rid of them.
That she brought a lot of this on herself by simply refusing to believe she was a carrier, and even if she didn't believe, by living so sloppy and with such disinterest and lack of self-respect (we already know from history that she died in absolute squalor with no reason at all for having done so) that she couldn't be bothered to wash her own feces off her hands when she cooked food. It's as simple as that.
And, as another reviewer pointed out, don't read this around supper time. You're going to be reading about feces and urine and squalor from page to page. Then you're going to wash your hands. A lot.
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