Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague

New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019. Stated First Edition. Hardcover. Very good +/Very good +. Stated First Edition. Hardcover. Stated First Edition with full number line indicating first printing. 9 1/2" X 6 1/4". 273pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of unclipped dust jacket. Black cloth over boards with spine lettered in gilt. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is firm and sound. Includes 14 illustrations.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:
A spine-chilling saga of virulent racism, human folly, and the ultimate triumph of scientific progress.

For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant (truncated) a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn't noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong's tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed ten million lives worldwide.

To local press, railroad barons, and elected officials, such a possibility was inconceivable or inconvenient. As they mounted a cover-up to obscure the threat, ending the career of one of the most brilliant scientists in the nation in the process, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save a city that refused to be rescued. Spearheading a relentless crusade for sanitation, Blue and his men patrolled the squalid streets of fast-growing San Francisco, examined gory black buboes, and dissected diseased rats that put the fate of the entire country at risk.

In the tradition of Erik Larson and Steven Johnson, Randall spins a spellbinding account of Blue's race to understand the disease and contain its spread the only hope of saving San Francisco, and the nation, from a gruesome fate.(Publisher). (Inventory #: 7115)