Do Something This Weekend of August 22, 2008
“Avoid getting wet!”1
Geek Out
Investigate explosive diarrhea. Lest you accuse Geek Out New York of sensationalism, let it be known that there is a strong medical reason for that slug line (also, it was funny). Lower intestinal distress is the major symptom of cholera, which unhumorously claimed scores of thousands of lives in the nineteenth century. The New York Historical Society’s “Plague in Gotham! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York” exhibit, ending August 31, presents artifacts from an age when cholera threatened the evolution of urban areas worldwide. While most of us are at least familiar with cholera as one of many quaint ways to die in Oregon Trail, it’s a disease worth exploring further.
My attention was drawn to cholera after finishing Steven Johnson’s book The Ghost Map, which chronicles the 1854 London outbreak as the dawn of modern ideas about public health. (Snap review: Fascinating, but don’t bother with the filler-y last chapter.) I was stunned to learn that, as the poster above shows, there were myriad prevention/treatment techniques for cholera, yet the most effective treatment (the only effective treatment, really) was to drink plenty of clean water. Seems simple now, but it took decades to figure this out.
Geek In
Enjoy a nice, tall Cold War. Regular readers know I have something of a fetish for the Cold War. The crazy geopolitical permutations, the technological one-upmanship, the larger-than-life politicians—it all gets my pulse racing. It’s easy to take pleasure in the definitive global conflict of the 20th Century when you only had to live through the tail end of it.
For buffs and novices alike, I highly recommend Michael Dobbs’ One Minute to Midnight, a thorough hour-by-hour retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This has to be the definitive book on the crisis, which is extraordinary since no two-week period has caused as much ink to be spilled by historians as this showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Dobbs not only adds new detail gleaned from careful research, he also corrects many longstanding misconceptions, including the famous “eyeball to eyeball” moment off the coast of Cuba, which, as Dobbs explains, never actually happened. That’s not to imply that the drama isn’t intense. Dobbs manages to juggle the complexity of the affair while telling a gripping story. I’m almost finished with the book, yet I hesitate to polish it off because, unlike everyone who was actually there, I don’t want the crisis to end.
All contents copyright © 2007-2008 John Teti.
