Synopses & Reviews
The veteran Wall Street Journal science reporter Marilyn Chases fascinating account of an outbreak of bubonic plague in late Victorian San Francisco is a real-life thriller that resonates in todays headlines. The Barbary Plague transports us to the Gold Rush boomtown in 1900, at the end of the citys Gilded Age. With a deep understanding of the effects on public health of politics, race, and geography, Chase shows how one city triumphed over perhaps the most frightening and deadly of all scourges.