Behind the outbreak
Ebola
Story of an Outbreak By Laurie Garrett (Hachette; $2.99)
CNN ranked Ebola the top news story of 2014, but already it has slipped from the headlines, following an all-toofamiliar pattern “of response and abandonment, discovery followed by complacency, urgency that devolves to amnesia,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett writes. “One day’s public health crisis is the next’s job done — and forgotten.” Here she touches on a recent trip to Liberia and Sierra Leone and recounts her investigation of the 1995 outbreak in Zaire that led in part to her book “Betrayal of Trust.”
Ebola had been dormant for 19 years when it resurfaced in the southwestern city of Kikwit. Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, had raided the country’s treasury of more than $11 billion, leaving a health care system so decimated that it “existed in name only.” Garrett grounds her reporting in stories about individuals and their families, how the disease spread from a 43-year-old charcoal maker to his brother, his youngest son, to other relatives and beyond until nearly 300 people had lost their lives. Though most of the story is a rehash, the message — that governments in Africa and throughout the world must commit to dramatic improvements in public health infrastructure — is as timely today as ever.
Conduct Unbecoming
Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military By Randy Shilts (Open Road Media; $14.99)
Another recently reissued book worth reading is the long out-of-print historical account of gays and lesbians in the military by pioneering San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts, the first openly gay reporter covering gay issues in the American mainstream press. Shilts died in 1994, a year after the book’s original publication and the same year that “don’t ask, don’t tell” took effect.
This 832-page, exhaustively researched book is packed with information dating back to the founding of the country but focuses mostly on the purges of gay and lesbian military of the past hundred years. We learn about President Eisenhower’s executive orders defining gays as security risks and J. Edgar Hoover’s overt efforts to persecute homosexuals. Most compelling are the stories of soldiers who served the country with distinction only to be banished from the service, patriots like Major Frederick Von Steuben, second only to George Washington in the training of Revolutionary troops, and Navy doctor Tom Dooley, who treated countless refugees in Vietnam and became a national hero, only to be outed and forced to resign from the Navy. This important book is a rich narrative history and also a memorial to those whose names should have been etched in stone.
Safety Tips for Living Alone By Jim Shepard (Electric Literature; $1.99)
Early in the 1950s, at the height of Cold War paranoia about Russian air attacks, the Department of Defense built five oil-rig-like platforms along the East Coast equipped with powerful radar equipment for spotting enemy planes. Known as the Texas Towers, the platforms cost $11 million each and “faced engineering problems as unprecedented as the space program’s.” Most precarious was Tower No. 4, at the edge of the continental shelf, and built 125 feet deeper than any previous offshore structure. “It moved so much in heavy weather that everyone who worked on it called it Old Shaky.”
As he often does in his awardwinning fiction, Jim Shepard takes a historical footnote and combines thorough research, evocative detail and taut characterization to bring the story to life. “Safety Tips for Living Alone” is the length of a short novella but has the reach of a novel, shifting between the points of view of four men who work on Tower No. 4 and each of their wives, stuck at home with a growing dread. After a hurricane cripples the tower and the crew faces an even greater storm, we follow every perspective, every moment in a series of terrifying, devastating, breathtakingly vivid scenes.
The Fort of Young Saplings By Vanessa Veselka (The Atavist; $3.99)
By age 11, Vanessa Veselka had lived in seven states, gone to five schools, seen her parents remarry multiple times, and learned what it meant to live between worlds: She grew up in New York City but spent her summers and early years in Juneau; her father was adopted into the Kiksadi clan of a Native Alaskan tribe called the Tlingit, but outside of Alaska people told her that she wasn’t a real Indian.
Throughout her childhood, she heard stories about the Tlingit, “a fiercely martial people [who] never surrendered to a colonial power, never ceded territory,” and helped negotiate a lucrative bill that “was the gold standard of indigenous settlements.” But on a visit to Juneau in 2011, hoping to connect with her Native roots, Veselka learns that during the famous Battle of Sitka in 1804, the Tlingit did not stand firm but in fact abandoned their fort, allowing the Russian invaders to take over. Was it an act of surrender? Or a brilliant strategy to flee, regroup and later claim victory? Veselka’s need to answer these and other questions makes for an absorbing essay, both an urgent historical investigation and an intimate search for identity.