An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 Book

I have to admit that I learned some things from this book. I had no idea that for about 3 months the Federal government got shut down because of yellow fever. Imagine that? For three months nothing happened in the government, no laws were passed, no meetings, nothing and yet the world still went on, and this at a time much more critical than normal, when part of the population wanted another revolution to go along with the French Revolution, and the entire country was only a few years old. So because all of the people in government were afraid of catching the disease they went home for awhile, left their papers behind, and didn't meet up and do anything because at the time convening the Congress anywhere else would have been unconstitutional. And I'll say it again, things went on and the world didn't end, and the country didn't collapse in on itself, all kinds of things didn't happen. Neat huh?

This isn't the moral of the story, that government is sort of worthless, and that people can kind of take care of themselves without being treated like ignorant four year olds (sadly though most people are just about as good at behaving without authority as an ignorant four year old, sigh); that's not the moral at all of this book. Instead it's about disease, and exposing kids to what medicine was like in the 1790's, and what life was like then, and how a group of African-Americans showed themselves to be just about the only decent people in a city being ravaged by disease, fear and paranoia and how these same decent people later got the shaft from cowardly white folk who ran to the hills as soon as they saw plague like things coming at them.

I don't know much about kids, or really what age this book is meant for, but this is actually a pretty heavy book for kids, but kind of cool too because weaved into the story are all kinds of little sub-texts that could work as rational time-bombs on their developing minds.

I would give it four stars, but a few of the sentences really bothered me, and the authors use of exclamation points in the latter part of the book irked me with it's unnecessary junvinality (is this even a word?!?), something the book I feel had avoided up until those pesky little punctuation marks reared their heads!