Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/198576
Reading:3 8/15/07 3:36 PM Page 19 ing and well-researched history that evokes within the reader his or her own personal wanderlust. Having spent more than 30 years teaching college economics in the Pittsburgh-Johnstown area of Western Pennsylvania, Yates decided to enjoy retirement by exploring America with his wife, Karen Korenoski. They sold their Pennsylvania home, unloaded the majority of their belongings, and set off for Yellowstone National Park, where they worked in guest services during the tourist season. It is at Yellowstone that Yates begins to observe the quirks of American tourism and the social injustice of the tourism industry. The travelers earn less than $600 per fortnight— combined—and sleep in a 10 foot-by-10 foot room. Through the course of the book, Yates and Korenoski continue touring the continental United States, visiting the Pacific Northwest from Washington's Olympia Peninsula down through California's fertile central valley; the magnificent deserts and border culture of the Southwest; and the Southern comfort of the Gulf states. Along the way, they become infatuated with and pause for several months in New York City; Portland, Ore.; South Beach, Fla.; and Estes Park, Colo. Traveling only with the most basic of necessities in a van, Yates and Korenoski's unfettered and unplanned wandering evoke more than a little jealousy in all who enjoy an exploratory road trip. Traversing all these breathtaking and undeniably different locales, one strong theme emerges: the appropriation of our common landscapes by the wealthy and powerful. The rugged wilderness around Jackson, Wyo. is now largely owned by "twotwo-eighters," couples who spend two weeks a year in their 8,000 square foot homes. In Miami Beach, wealthy guests of beachfront hotels arbitrarily rope off public beaches for extravagant private parties, posting security guards at the perimeters. The most upsetting anecdote, however, comes from the red rocks of Sedona, where Yates and Korenoski reach the crest of a trail only to see the magnificent canyon view desecrated by a sprawling 70-acre luxury resort perched on the cliffside: We returned to the main trail and began to traverse the canyon. We had to walk alongside the resort, hard up against a tall and imposing boundary fence. We complained about it as we hiked past. How did this vacation spot gain control of so much of the canyon? Did the guests find it natural that they were behind locked gates and needed keys to access the trail? What was the fence protecting? Yates later discovers that rooms at the Enchantment Resort run as high as $2,005 a night. As the summer vacation season starts in earnest, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is an educational and easy read on the perils some of our national treasures face, and why they are worth fighting for. Whether you're heading off on your own transnational road trip or parking J U LY | A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 yourself firmly in a backyard hammock, this book is a versatile and worthy companion. —erika larson Race & Medicine in Nineteenth- and EarlyTwentieth-Century America by Todd L. Savitt. 453 pp., $49 T odd L. Savitt's Race and Medicine in Nineteenth- and EarlyTwentieth Century America examines the healthcare of African Americans from the antebellum period to the Reconstruction era and impressively delineates the development of the black medical profession through the early 1900s. In this collection of essays, Savitt, a professor in the Department of Medical Humanities at Brody School of Medicine of East Carolina University, allows us to more thoroughly understand the plight of slaves and postbellum blacks by focusing on their health issues, and chronicles the struggle to develop a black medical profession to serve the needs of a community often shut out by mainstream white racist society. In the first section of the book, Savitt overviews the ailments most frequently afflicting slaves, including pulmonary infections, to which Africans were more susceptible, and the parasitic diseases transferred from tropical Africa that found hospitable environments in the hot and humid climate of the American South. In another chapter, Savitt dismantles historic explanations for the alarming rate of death among black infants in antebellum Virginia. Those deaths, Savitt proffers, were not caused by slave mothers' careless smothering of their own babies, as apologists for slavery once claimed, but were attributable to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is now found to be more common among low-income people in general and among African Americans in particular, probably due to overcrowded housing and unsanitary living conditions. Not surprisingly, Savitt dedicates a large portion of the first section to sickle-cell anemia (SCA). Although the disease most certainly affected many blacks on the plantation—22 percent of newly-arrived Africans carried the sickle cell gene, which is now known to give its carriers full or partial immunity to the most severe form of malaria—the disease was not discovered until the early 1900s, when doctors in Chicago and Virginia independently came across patients who had elongated, sickle-shaped red blood cells, and who suffered from a cluster of symptoms characteristic of SCA patients. Savitt's fascinating recounting of the discovery of the disease involves two patients—one a Grenadian dental student from a wealthy family, and the other a poor housekeeper from Virginia— and the physicians who treated them. In these chapters, we see how advances in medical technology and changes in race relations facilitated the unraveling of a mystery that must have baffled white Southerners throughout the antebellum period, who were undoubtedly frustrated by SCArelated symptoms among their slaves and curious as to why so many of them seemed to be immune to malaria. W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G REGISTERED NURSE 19