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Molly Caldwell Crosby. The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History. New York: Berkley Books, 2006. viii + 308 pp. Ill. $24.95 (0-425-21202-5).
The untold story of yellow fever? Molly Caldwell Crosby, a journalist, is a gifted writer: her prose is vivid and captivating. Unfortunately, the story that she relates- focused mainly on how yellow fever nearly obliterated Memphis in 1878 and on how Walter Reed later established that mosquitoes transmitted the disease-has in fact been told repeatedly, and many parts of it have been told too often.
Caldwell Crosby has a knack for finding sources of the details that draw in readers; she uses Department of Agriculture records to describe the weather on particular days, for...