Medical Mystery Woman: Terrible Typhoid Mary: A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

That night it snowed lightly. The next morning, March 19, 1907, Dr. Josephine Baker waited with three policeman at the corner, as instructed. Soon a horse-drawn ambulance pulled up. She stationed one police officer around the corner from the house and one in front of the house. The third officer accompanied her to the servants' back entrance. She figured all escape routes were blocked.

She approached the kitchen door and knocked. To her shock Mary Mallon was armed and ready, holding "a long kitchen fork in her hand like a rapier." She lunged at Baker. Caught off guard--it seems Dr. Soper had not warned her about carving forks--Baker recoiled, falling backwards into the officer.

The cook bolted through the kitchen. By the time Baker and the officer scrambled to their feet, wrote Baker, "Mary had disappeared."

Enlisting two more policemen, Dr. Baker searched the house for two more hours. But as she started out the front door, one of the policemen pointed to one of several ashcans piled beneath the stoop. A tiny fold of blue calico was stuck in the door. The exact calico of the dress Mary was wearing.

When people started falling ill of typhoid fever at the Long Island summer residence rented by the wealthy Warren family, the progressive public health authorities of New York had rolled into action. Water, block ice, milk, fruits and vegetables supplied to the house were tested for typhoid bacilli and were negative. The water tanks and pipes were tested. Even the cesspool and servant privies show no signs of contamination. Mr. Warren, banker to the Vanderbilts, was adamant that the cause of his little daughter's near brush with death be found. But the house turned up negative to all their tests, and the servants remained healthy. The case seemed closed.

But was it? The wealthy owner of the house fretted that her house was now a pariah. So the frustrated officials finally called in an expert, Dr. George Soper, a proven disease detective. Soper repeated all the testing of the house and the suppliers of ice and food. Finding no sources of infection, he became more and more convinced that the disease had to been brought in from outside the house. He re-interviewed the Warrens and asked about servants who had left or were added during the summer. Not one servant.

Except.

The cook who had been fired. The new cook came with good recommendations. She had worked for some of the finest families. She began work on August 4. Her name was Mary Mallon.

The Warren's nine-year-old Margaret had become ill a few days after eating Mary's delicious hand-churned ice cream prepared with the finest fresh peaches from local farmers. Warren Soper believed he had found the vector of the disease. But he needed proof, specimens collected from the apparently strong and healthy cook who denied ever having typhoid. The powers of the New York Public Health Authority provided for the arrest of Mary Mallon for definitive testing. Mary was quarantined at the Brothers Island sanitarium and forced to submit samples. And meanwhile Soper's investigation of Mary's former employers found that cases of typhoid had indeed turned up in a succession of the homes where Mary had worked as cook.

Soper had incontrovertible evidence that Mary Mallon was that rare specimen herself, a healthy typhoid carrier, capable of introducing the bacteria through her contact with food in the visibly spotless kitchens she ran with such skill. It did not help that she was immigrant Irish, a minority looked down upon as dirty and shiftless by some native New Yorkers.

Mary became the object of a media frenzy. Dubbed "Typhoid Mary," the newspapers pictured her as the villain of an intriguing medical detective story, complete with a thrilling capture of the fugitive cook. Mary, however, saw herself as the innocent victim of an illegal detention by the authorities, seized for medical experimentation, and an immigrant citizen held without due process.  She filed suit against the government which had determined that she must be detained indefinitely on an island in the harbor. "I have been a peep show for everybody," she lamented.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti's riveting history mystery, Terrible Typhoid Mary: A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) reads like a page-turning novel, but it is indeed a well-documented historical account of an event in which the past is indeed prelude, with contemporary ramifications for the borderline between civil law and civil rights exemplified currently by distrust of science and government in the controversy over enforced vaccinations.

Mary, clearly a courageous and intelligent, albeit scientifically uneducated woman, is portrayed empathetically as a strong advocate for her rights, but as Bartelletti's text and meticulous timeline shows, Mary was responsible for twenty cases of typhoid and one death in her various workplaces. Then, when granted limited freedom in 1910 that required she appear monthly to her parole officer and refrain from working as a cook, Mary Mallon eventually jumped parole and in 1914 was the cause of an multiple-case outbreak of typhoid among mothers and newborns at a maternity hospital where she again worked as cook. For that deliberate act, Typhoid Mary, whose name remains a metaphor for a public menace to this day, was again incarcerated on an island in the harbor where she died in 1938.

American Library Association's Siebert Award-winning author Bartoletti has created a finely crafted text to this well designed book with impressive scholarly backmatter--a period photo and graphics gallery, an extensive notes section of citations to sources, a timeline of Mary Mallon's life, an impressive bibliography and an index--that provides a thorough look for young scholars at the known facts on Typhoid Mary and the public health movement of the period. Rave starred reviews all around for the outstanding Terrible Typhoid Mary: A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America suggest that this is one to be watched when non-fiction awards for this year are announced for young adult readers.

First Steps! March: Book One by John Lewis

By noon, thousands of people had gathered at Tennessee State University to march on City Hall.

Martin Luther King came and said, "I came to Nashville not to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community.

No lie can live forever. Let us not despair.

Walk together, children."

It makes sense that the progress of  American civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s came to be called "The Movement," because sitting down, and standing up for equal rights, walking, and marching en masse all played a pivotal role. As one elderly  Montgomery bus-boycotting grandmother, trudging to work, said, "I'm not walking for myself. I'm walking for my children and my grandchildren."

John Lewis and Andrew Aydin's 2014 Coretta Scott King Award-winning March:  Book 1 (Top Shelf Productions, 2013) begins with a dream sequence as a crowd begins its ill-fated march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a dark dream from which Congressman John Lewis awakens early on January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day.

As Lewis enters his office at the Capitol that morning, a mother and a couple of children happen by, and he invites them in. As he explains the photos and framed documents on his wall, Lewis tell the boys about his sharecropping childhood, his beloved flock of chickens, his struggles to stay in school even when his father ordered him to stay home to work on the farm, and how his early experiences brought him to be on Edmund Pettus Bridge that day, to be beaten senseless, but to survive to help lead the Civil Rights Movement forward.

But his role didn't begin at the March from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.  It really began when he and others schooled in the ways of non-violent resistance began sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee. Students from nearby Tennessee State University organized sit-ins at lunch counters downtown. At first they politely left when service was refused, but as the movement grew, white students joined them. Still refused, they tried a new tactic. They simply sat and did not leave. The lunch counters were closed, and the lights were turned off, and still they remained. Arrested, they refused bail and filled the local jail.

Frustrated, the police considered leaving the demonstrators to the groups of armed whites, people who boasted they would beat the students until they gave up. Finally a leader's home was bombed. A call went out and the students were able to bring forth thousands of black and white supporters who filled the streets of downtown Nashville, all marching to City Hall to call out the Mayor. The Mayor agreed that their cause was just, and soon Nashville quietly integrated its public places. It was only one step on the road to full civil rights, but those relentlessly marching feet finally changed the country.

Written in the format of a graphic novel, this graphic memoir traces one major episode of the Civil Rights Movement witnessed by John Lewis as he lived it. Drawn in black and white with great impact by Nate Powell, the neo-comic-book format offers a new way for middle readers to experience these signal events through the eyes of someone still living, someone who was there to take every step, from Nashville, to Selma, to the March on Washington, and through a long career in Congress. Along with other first-person accounts, this book offers young people a unique chance to understand that critical period in American history. Kirkus Reviews calls this one "... a powerful tale of courage and principle igniting sweeping social change, told by a strong-minded, uniquely qualified eyewitness."

To round out a unit for Black History Month, include this new one with Russell Freedman's Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Andrea Davis Pinkney's account of the Greensboro sit-ins, Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down (Jane Addams Honor Book (Awards)), Shelley Tougas' Little Rock Girl 1957: How a Photograph Changed the Fight for Integration (Captured History), Kathleen Krull's What Was the March on Washington? and Cristine King Farris' March On!: The Day My Brother Martin Changed the World.

You Asked For More! More Bones: Scary Stories from Around the World retold by Arielle North Olson and Howard Schwartz

The maiden stopped by a grave that looked quite fresh. She pulled forth her shovel and began to dig, flinging clods of dirt to one side....The soldier could see that she had uncovered a small coffin.

Imagine his surprise when she lifted the lid, opened the white shroud, and tore off an arm from the corpse inside....

"If you love me, you will eat what I eat," she cried, ripping the other arm off the corpse and tossing it to the soldier.

He didn't hesitate. He took a large bite himself. Now he was even more surprised. He was eating a candy corpse, made of sugar and rice flour.

The maiden burst out laughing. "You are the only one of my suitors who did not run away. I want to marry a brave husband, and you are the one."

Readers love scary surprises, and More Bones: Scary Stories from Around the World, (Puffin, 2009) sequel to the critically acclaimed Ask the Bones: Scary Stories from Around the World (Puffin, 2002) has plenty of them. Collected from folklore sources from Iceland to Hawaii, Yiddish villages to China, all of these stories feature rising suspense and a spooky ending which concludes just before the really scary event promises to happen. For example, "The Gruesome Test," the Japanese tale quoted above seems to be ending on a bit of grisly irony, but the real climax is even more surprising and scary:

You would think the soldier would laugh, too. The maiden was not a monster, after all. But he glowered at her. "Only candy?" he said. "I thought you were giving me much more." He grabbed her shovel and began to dig up a real grave.

This time it was the maiden who ran away screaming.

These stories don't feature the usual suspects--the standard sheeted ghosts, black-clad vampires, or hairy werewolves. People everywhere love scary stories, and their fertile imaginations come up with quite a unique collection of spooky characters. We meet the Norwegian draug, the twisted spirits of drowned seamen who lure fishermen to their death by drowning, a wicked witch of the woods who shape-changes into an irresistibly beautiful woman, a pretty Chinese girl whose night secret is discovered by her unfortunate bridegroom when he wakens to find her sharpening her teeth on a piece of wood, a vengeful spirit which guards a treasure deep within the Alhambra in Spain, and a headless horse ridden by a headless horseman through the Irish night.

For readers who have already read and loved Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark 25th Anniversary Edition: Collected from American Folklore, these two volumes are worthy additions to that popular shelf of genuinely spooky and spookily genuine folk tales.

Time Travelers: Wild Horses: Galloping Through Time by Kelly Milner Halls

Watching those sleek three-year-olds, long, delicate legs stretching out to cover the track in the famous races of the Triple Crown, it is hard to imagine that the first ancestor of the horse was an eight-inch high creature with four horny toes on its front legs and three on its rear legs. No majestic master of the steppes was this little "dawn horse" either; preyed upon by land and river carnivores, the shy Hyracotherium met its extinction 45 million years ago, long before any would-be human wrangler appeared. But its relatives persisted, evolving through the Mesohippus to Merychippus as a grazing herd animal progressively running faster as its toes evolved into speedy hooves.

By the time Pliohippus evolved, with its one sturdy and swift hoof on each foot, its kind, still small at 12 hands high, had acquired wide-set eyes to spot predators and special adaptations of the skull which enabled the characteristic range of whinnies with which the herd communicated, and this nearly modern horse ranged widely across North America. Despite its land of origin, however, its inheritor, Equus, the modern horse, which successfully emigrated across the land bridge to Asia, soon became extinct in the Americas, leaving its migrant descendants across Asia and Europe to become the horse of human history and legend.

Kelly Milner Halls' Wild Horses: Galloping Through Time (Darby Creek Exceptional Titles) goes on to tell the story of Equus and how they became the work horse and war horse of our own story, changing the face of civilization throughout Eurasia.

Halls features especially the intriguing story of the Przewalski horse, the last and almost vanished descendants of those wild horses first hunted for food and depicted by our early ancestors in those famous cave paintings at Lascaux. Like their cousins the zebras, Prazewalski horses have short stiff black manes, no forelocks, a dark strip down the center of the back, and even occasional barred hindquarters. A "rescued" species, less than 1900 Przewleskis are alive today, despite heroic efforts to shelter them in the wild and breed them in captivity after their numbers were decimated during World War II.

Halls also describes the historic horses of Europe and the Middle East--the Tarpan, the Sorraia, the Camargue and the Konik, and the Caspian and the Arabian, and does not neglect the wild horses of Africa--the various zebra relatives, the Namibia horse, and the wild ass. She then turns again back to North America where Equus began, with the story of the wild horses reintroduced by the Conquistadors and other explorers--the mustangs, Abaco Barbs, and even the burros of our own recent times.

Illustrated lushly with colored photos and detailed drawings, Wild Horses: Galloping Through Time (Darby Creek Exceptional Titles) is a fascinating study of the animal which, with its strength and speed, so thoroughly shaped much of human life. Author Halls also appends listings of sources of information and sites where wild horses may be studied and observed in North America, organizations which specialize in wild horse rescue, and an extensive bibliography of journal articles, books, and web sites, as well as a full index, to round out this thoroughly researched and readable nonfiction book.

The Big War: "What Have We Done?"- Hiroshima by Laurence Yep

Laurence Yep calls this slim volume Hiroshima: A Novella, but it is less a fiction work than a literary docu-drama, shifting its focus, chapter by chapter, between deceptively ordinary morning life in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, The Enola Gay and its attendant B-29's flying toward the city, and expositions of the history of the Pacific war with Japan and the history of the bomb itself.

In stark, almost journalistic prose, Yep describes an ordinary morning in wartime Hiroshima, as his fictional character, twelve-year-old Sachi, joins classmates in the labor of clearing fire lanes inside the city in expectation of American bombings. Air raid warnings, shelters, and pitifully ineffective hoods worn to protect against fire bombings are part of the children's daily experience, but no human preparations can shield them against the coming destruction. Above them the lead B-29 reports a propitious hole in the clouds directly over the city and signals the Enola Gay to begin its run over the city. As its crew records the incredible devastation below, the overwhelmed co-pilot scribbles the question humanity has asked since, "What have we done?"

On the ground Yep factually describes the unbelievable effects of the blast: the nuclear wind, the silhouettes of vanished victims burnt into concrete walls, the nuclear rain which both extinguished the fires and brought death by radiation to those who escaped the blast.

Yep backtracks to describe the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which began the war and the stubborn resistance of the Japanese people beyond the capitulation of the Third Reich which made the use of the atomic bomb seem inevitable. He moves forward in time to describe the reconciliation of the American and Japanese people, including the medical treatment of the Hiroshima Maidens, among whom he includes his fictional victim Sachi, and the peace movement which followed, touching upon the story of Sadako and the thousand cranes, the all-too-real threat of nuclear winter from the world's arsenal of weapons, and the nuclear treaties which now keep the threat of such weapons under tenuous control. Yep's final sentence is "It must not drop again."

Although this book is slim and the language simple, it is not a easy book for very young readers to take in. Its best audience would be middle readers, especially those who use Hiroshima as part of a class unit to explore the history and literature of this often glossed-over part of American history. Individual readers with some knowledge of the period will still find both facts and figures and ethical questions to ponder within. An extensive bibliography is appended.

Other significant works for young readers on this subject include My Hiroshima by Junko Morimoto, Hiroshima No Pika by Toshi Maruki, and Shin's Tricycle by Tatsuharu Kosama.

For capable older readers there is, of course, John Hersey's well-known work, Hiroshima.