Barren Island

Unbeknownst to most of the city's inhabitants, a rural community of garbage workers once existed on a now-vanished island in New York City. Barren Island was a swampy speck in Jamaica Bay where a motley group of new immigrants and African Americans quietly processed mountains of garbage and dead animals starting in the 1850s. They turned the waste into useful industrial products until their eviction by Robert Moses, in the name of progress, in 1936. Barren Islanders built businesses, fought fires, demanded a public school and worshipped at churches as they created a quintessentially American community from scratch. Author Miriam Sicherman tells the story of a Brooklyn neighborhood lost in the annals of New York City history.

How does one remember a world that literally no longer exists? How do the moral imperatives to do so correspond to the personal needs that make it possible? Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Barren Island is the story of a factory island in New York's Jamaica Bay, where the city's dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-19th century until the 1930's. The island itself is as central to the story as the members of the Jewish, Greek, Italian, Irish, and African-American factory families that inhabit it, including those who live their entire lives steeped in the smell of burning animal flesh. The story begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and explores how the political and social upheavals of the 1930's affect them and their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later. Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World's Fair, and the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil and social liberties between the two World Wars. Barren Island, finally, is a novel in which the existence of God is argued with a God that may no longer exist or, perhaps, never did.

Unbeknownst to most of the city's inhabitants, a rural community of garbage workers once existed on a now-vanished island in New York City. Barren Island was a swampy speck in Jamaica Bay where a motley group of new immigrants and African Americans quietly processed mountains of garbage and dead animals starting in the 1850s. They turned the waste into useful industrial products until their eviction by Robert Moses, in the name of progress, in 1936. Barren Islanders built businesses, fought fires, demanded a public school and worshipped at churches as they created a quintessentially American community from scratch. Author Miriam Sicherman tells the story of a Brooklyn neighborhood lost in the annals of New York City history.

Polio--often called the "summer plague"--struck hundreds of thousands of children around the world between its emergence as an epidemic disease in 1916 to its cure in the 1950s. Today, images of children with crutches and leg braces or encased to their necks in iron lungs may be little more than a painful memory. Yet during its height the disease induced panic on a scale reminiscent of the great plagues of history. This book is the most comprehensive and compelling account of the century's polio epidemics yet written. Interweaving biographical, political, social, and medical history, Tony Gould--a distinguished British writer and himself a polio survivor--traces the rise and fall of the epidemics and describes the individuals who were influential in its treatment and conquest. He tells of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the most celebrated polio sufferer of all, who set up his own hydrotherapy center at Warm Springs in Georgia; John Enders, the Nobel prizewinner who made the crucial breakthrough in the laboratory; FDR's lieutenant, Basil O'Connor, whose "March of Dimes" became a byword for successful fund-raising; Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the larger-than-life nurse from the Australian outback who challenged medical orthodoxy and invented "miracle" cures; and finally the scientific rivals Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, caught in a dramatic race to produce a viable vaccine. Gould then examines the experience of polio survivors on both sides of the Atlantic, including a moving autobiographical account of his own struggle with the disease and resulting disability. Although the disease has been eliminated in the West, it has not disappeared: paralytic polio remains a scourge in India, the Far East, and parts of Africa. And there are new worries that fatigue and accelerated muscular weakness--a "post-polio syndrome"--has come to afflict survivors three or four decades after the initial attack. Gould's powerful book, published forty years after the successful trial of the Salk vaccine, helps us to understand the savage and continuing impact of polio.

Includes the Annual report of the Geological Survey of India, 1867-