Böcker av Gregg Coodley

"e;A clearly written, information-rich guide to the impact of infectious diseases on the United States and our responses to each of them. Coodley and Sarasohn demonstrate how science and public health have had to counter fear, ignorance and hubris-along with the microbes themselves-in battles that reached a desultory climax with our misbegotten reckoning with Covid-19."e; Arthur Allen, author of The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl"e;The book is a timely and urgent reminder that the battle against deadly infectious disease must be relentless. It celebrates our victories without losing sight of the horrendous human toll exacted, and it warns us that we repeat the mistakes of the past at our own peril."e; Stephen Coss, author of The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic that Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics---Infection has written its own history of the United States, terrifying, sickening and killing more Americans that all the nation's wars put together. Taming Infection is the story of fifteen of the worst diseases to strike the United States throughout our history and how Americans brought them under control.Some of these diseases now are associated only with far away lands. Yet, at one time, malaria afflicted most of the United States, even infecting multiple Presidents. Plague struck in San Francisco, and cholera and typhoid in New York. Diphtheria was once the great killer of American children, while smallpox infected, but luckily did not kill, both Washington and Lincoln. Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe and Eleanor Roosevelt died from tuberculosis. Yellow fever shut down the Federal government in the then capitol of Philadelphia, forcing Alexander Hamilton to flee to an involuntary quarantine. Al Capone would succumb to syphilis while his nemesis, Eliot Ness, led the campaign against the disease in the American army in WWII. More modern afflictions, including the influenza, AIDS and Covid-19 pandemics, reminds us that infections still punish and terrify Americans. Sadly, Americans often first reacted to these calamities with ignorance, bizarre therapies and scapegoating of minorities. Protests against vaccines predated the American Revolution, while the Anti-Mask League was formed in 1918, not 2021. Yet Taming Infection is also the story of triumphs and heroes, in medicine and public health and among ordinary citizens, that helped the United States vanquish, or at least tame, these deadly maladies. Each disease has carved its own mark in American history and among Americans; some are still carving.

In The Green Years, 1964"e;1976, Gregg Coodley and David Sarasohn offer the first comprehensive history of the period when the US created the legislative, legal, and administrative structures for environmental protection that are still in place over fifty years later. Coodley and Sarasohn tell a dramatic story of cultural change, grassroots activism, and political leadership that led to the passage of a host of laws attacking pollution under President Johnson. At the same time, with Stewart Udall as secretary of the interior, the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and other land-protection measures were passed and the department shifted its focus from western resource development to broader national conservation issues. The magnitude of what was accomplished was without precedent, even under conservation-minded presidents like the two Roosevelts. The fast-paced story the authors tell is not only about the Democratic Party; in this era there was still a vital Republican conservation tradition. In the 1960s, Republicans were chronologically as close to Teddy Roosevelt as to Donald Trump. In both the House and Senate and in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Republicans played vital roles. It was President Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the 1970 Clean Air Act, revisions in 1972 to the Clean Water Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Under Nixon, actions were taken to protect the oceans, forests, coastal zones, and grasslands while regulating chemicals, pesticides, and garbage.The authors analyze the full range of transformations during the Green Years, from the creation of entirely new pollution-control industries to backpacking becoming mass recreation to how revelations about chemical exposure spurred the natural food movement. And not least, the tectonic shift in the political landscape of the United States with the western states becoming Republican bastions and centers of ongoing backlash against the federal government. The Green Years, 1964"e;1976, is the story of environmental progress in the midst of war and civil unrest, and of the lessons we can learn for our future.