New Publications
Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution, by Holly Tucker (304 pages, March 2011), reopens the case of Jean-Baptiste Denis, physician to King Louis XIV of France, who was responsible for the first two successful transfusions of animal blood (in small quantities) into human beings. His third attempt on the 34-year-old mentally imbalanced Antoine Mauroy, who had once been valet to the Marquise de Sévigné, ended fatally and Denis was brought to trial in Paris on April 17, 1668. Luckily for Denis, it turned out that Mauroy’s wife Perrine had actually poisoned him with arsenic supplied by some “enemies of the experiment.” But the judge ruled all further blood transfusions illegal unless approved by the Parisian Faculty of Medicine (an unlikely event) and effectively condemned the procedure for the next 150 years, as English and German scientists followed suit. Tucker raises an interesting question: What would have happened if transfusion experiments had been allowed in a society that knew nothing about blood types, antisepsis, and immunology? In the course of examining the Denis case, she also covers the state of 17th-century medicine and experimentation, the rivalry between the French Academy of Sciences and the English Royal Society, and debates over transfusion as transmutation: As Samuel Pepys mused, what would happen if the “blood of a Quaker [were] let into an Archbishop?” A well-documented and readable account. $25.95. W. W. Norton. 978-0-393-07055-2.
Constructing the Ancient World: Architectural Techniques of the Greeks and Romans, by Carmelo G. Malacrino (216 pages, August 2010), is an easy-to-understand overview of the materials and methods used to build the foundations, walls, arches, and columns of the great edifices of the classical world. The book begins with the types of stone and marble the Greeks and Romans used and where and how they were quarried, then explains the use of the other essential building blocks of clay, terracotta, lime, mortar, and plaster. After examining the differing construction technologies in the Greek and Roman worlds, Malacrino goes on to a closer look at materials transport, work-site techniques, ancient hydraulic systems, heating systems and baths, roads and bridges, and tunnels. Accompanied by many well-chosen illustrations and helpful charts. $50.00. Getty Publications. 978-1-60606-016-2.
Cypress Gardens, America’s Tropical Wonderland: How Dick Pope Invented Florida, by Lu Vickers (358 pages, November 2010), celebrates the 73-year history of this “epicenter of modern Florida tourism,” which was set up by entrepreneurs Dick and Julie Pope in 1936 on drained swampland near Winter Gardens. The Cypress Gardens attraction, promoted in newsreels and Hollywood movies, became world-renowned for its botanical gardens filled with exotic plants, water-skiing extravaganzas, Aqua Maid ballerinas, hoop-skirted Southern Belles, flower queens, and swimmer and movie star Esther Williams’s Florida-shaped pool. Vickers offers hundreds of anecdotes gleaned from the Pope family and the theme park’s later owners, as well as abundant photos, postcards, and promotional materials from the enormous Cypress Gardens Archive. After a slow decline in the 1980s punctuated by several attempts to revive its former glory, the park closed in 2009, though there are plans to reopen it in late 2011 as Legoland Florida. $34.95. University Press of Florida. 978-0-8130-3499-7.
The Ethical Archivist, by Elena S. Danielson (437 pages, August 2010), explores the wide range of ethical dilemmas that arise in the course of archival work. Danielson, archivist emerita at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, warns that ethical codes cannot accommodate every situation and offers advice on general principles that archivists should follow to “establish a standard of integrity that inspires confidence in the documentary record.” One chapter is a case study on the “cigarette papers,” a treasure trove of studies on the addictive nature of nicotine from the former tobacco company Brown & Williamson that were leaked to Professor Stanton A. Glantz at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), School of Medicine, who then donated them to the UCSF library’s Tobacco Control Archives for safekeeping. The case vividly illustrates principles of open access, the acquisition of stolen materials, questionable provenance, third-party privacy, and the right of citizens to be informed on matters of public health. An appendix offers ten codes of ethics relating to archives and cultural property. $49.00. Society of American Archivists. 978-1-931666-34-2.
The Lincoln Assassination Encyclopedia, by Edward Steers Jr. (594 pages, May 2010), is an essential, one-stop reference book on the people, places, events, and conspiracies connected to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Concise and packed with contemporaneous photographs, this encyclopedia identifies many of the minor characters in the drama (such as “Coughdrop Joe” Ratto, who claimed to have held John Wilkes Booth’s horse that fatal night) and demolishes most conspiracy theories (particularly the involvement of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and the myth that someone other than Booth was killed at the Garrett Farm) while leaving the door slightly open for active support to Booth by the Confederate secret service. The book contains a foreword by Manhunt author James L. Swanson and an assassination chronology from 1860 through 1865. $19.99. HarperPerennial. 978-0-06-178775-1.
Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, by Georgann Eubanks (455 pages, October 2010), a sequel to the author’s Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains (2009), offers a tourist’s perspective on the rich literary history of the state’s central plateau. Divided into 18 tours, Eubanks guides you through the region’s towns, author birthplaces, literary settings, colleges, libraries, museums, cemeteries, churches, and memorials. Eubanks provides in-depth commentary on the significance of each site to North Carolina authors, poets, and playwrights, as well as plentiful excerpts that link the literature to the landscape. A third volume, presumably focusing on North Carolina’s coastal plain, is in the works. $37.50. University of North Carolina. 978-0-8078-5979-7.
Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South, by Claude A. Clegg III (230 pages, October 2010), unearths the nearly forgotten lynching of three African Americans in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1906 that nonetheless made national headlines at the time. Accused of the ax murders of a white family for whom they had worked, the three were taken from the jailhouse by a violent white mob and hung in the same spot where two black youngsters accused of rape and murder had been lynched four years earlier. The event was so blatant that local officials were shamed into attempting to prosecute some of the white mob leaders, resulting in one conviction for first-degree murder. Clegg takes an in-depth look at the tradition of mob violence and the politics of racial hatred in the New South. $80.00. University of Illinois. 978-0-252-03588-3.
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