Thank you Joanna for really pushing and pushing for me to read this - you see I do not like short stories! Joanna didn't give up on me b/c she knew what I like in books and she knew this book just could not be missed, despite that it was short stories. If you like short stories, you would probably give it 5 stars. The last story Ship Fever was longer and that cinched it for me.Science and history come alive in the fictional story Barrett weaves around the true facts! Here one sees the advantage of fiction over non-fiction. You get into the heads of the scientists and of the people living through tremendous times of suffering which history tends to be composed of. Ship Fever is about the Irish immigrants emigrating to Canada during the potato famine. The US had practically cut off its borders. These immigrants were starving and sick - here it wasn't plague but typhus! A glorius mixture of love and coldness, greed and caring and nonchalance - all emotions are there to be experienced and felt. You almost feel you are one of the main characters b/c the author has made them so real. You are in their heads. Other stories were fabulous too - although too short! OK, I am Swedish so it is perhaps not strange that I loved the story entitled The English Pupil. It is about Carl Linnaeus, when he is very old and confused. It takes place in Uppsala and Hammarby and I have walked there millions of times. The Botanical Gardens. The reader is right there. Again you are not looking from the outside at what is occurring but from the inside, from Linnaeus' head and also from the others who so well knew him. Barrett is extremely good at presenting how women see an issue. Intelligent women living at a time when they were not suppose to be interested in anything other than helping their husbands, food and servants and the house. Some had other interests and yes they let themselves follow these interests. You cannot help but laugh and be happy for them - see the story Rare Birds. The stories occurr during the 1700s and 1800s. I have to choose what book to read next by this author. Her ability to make science and history come alive is magnificent. This is achieved through her outstanding ability to get the reader inside the characters' heads. It is this latter ability that will help me choose which book to read.
Three stories stand out in this collection by Andrea Barrett--"Rare Bird", "Birds with no Feet", and the title story "Ship Fever". Barrett effortlessly weaves together historical events and people with fictional ones, so that the reader never knows which is which. "Rare Bird" is a perfectly constructed narrative describing a scientifically-minded woman's search to be taken seriously by her eighteenth century male colleagues. When she meets another woman who shares her interests they conduct experiments to determine if swallows hibernate under the water in the winter, even writing to an eminent naturalist of the time, Carl Linnaeus (who is the main character in Barrett's story "The English Pupil"). The ending at first troubled me with its vagueness, but after considering the plot and themes of the story I realized that it was the perfect ending. and I came instead to admire the neatness of story’s interconnectedness. In "Birds with No Feet" Alec, a young American tries to make his fortune by collecting specimens of animals in South America and Asia, running into Alfred Wallace along the way and hearing his developing thoughts on evolution.“Ship Fever” is a devastating novella about a doctor accustomed to treating the privileged takes a post at a quarantine station for immigrants during the Irish famine where he witnesses ship after ship over crowed with Irish infected with typhus fever.
LOVED the writing.There was so much hype about Olive Kitteredge - especially as a form - Ship Fever precedes Olive and it seems like Olive imitated it in significant ways.From status updates:The Littoral Zone. Have to love the title of that story! Great story about a love affair.Just finished The English Pupil. Beautiful story about a scholar at the end of his life.Finished first story: The Behavior of the Hawkweeds. Really liked it.I didn't love The Marburg Sisters story but I did like the voice and point of view. Interesting.I enjoyed the title story (almost a novella) "Ship Fever" - but the shifting points of view had become almost gimmicky by that point. I enjoyed it in "The Marburg Sisters" but not as much in "Ship Fever."Great characters that are easy to know almost immediately. I liked the story/novella Ship Fever (largely from a historical fiction point of view) but it had the least connection to the rest of the stories for me. The other stories were all stories about how people with a strong current of the natural world (botany, biology, etc) running through them - Ship Fever was about typhus ("ship fever") but that was a more tenuous connection for me.
—Kate Z
This book is a collection of short stories, loosely related to the theme of science and medicine. The quality of the stories range wildly. The best are truly outstanding and memorable, and the worst are dull and somewhat incoherent. If you happen across this book, I highly recommend English Pupil (which is one of the best short stories I've read) and to a somewhat lesser extent the title story, Ship Fever (which is quite compelling, but not at the level of English Pupil). I recommend skipping The Marburg Sisters.
—Doc Opp
This is a great collection of short stories based on historical facts. For example, the first, "The Behavior of Hawkweeds" describes how Mendel worked with the plants and found they did not follow the genetic patterns of the peas. The finest of the stories, however, is "Ship Fever". This historical novelette is stunning. Although some of the characters are fictitious, some are historical figures. The story is set in Quebec and the Grosse Isle quarantine station where tens of thousands of impoverished, starving and ill Irish immigrants were deposited after a horrendous journey on filthy, crowded ships without sanitary facilities and insufficient food.The story centers around a physician whose practice languishes in the city because he is too dedicated to the practice of "modern, scientific" medicine and refuses to bleed his patients as a matter of course. He is recruited to assist at the disembarkation center on Grosse Isle. On arriving there he finds incredible overcrowding, dead emigrants on the ships, stories of hundreds buried at sea, the despicable behavior of the landlords, who continued to export food when the local populace was starving and the role of the British government in the famine that forced them from their land.Even more tragic, was the "fever" that infected so many and caused so many deaths due to their terrible conditions. The fever was typhus. Caused by a Rickettsia (an obligate intracellular parasite) transmitted by lice, it killed 20-80% of those infected. (It is easily treated today with antibiotics.)There was a huge outbreak in Canada in 1847 and over 20,000 died. It is likely that the disease was brought by the immigrants, many of whom were sent up the river ill because of the lack of space at the Grosse Isle center.I found the story riveting and highly recommend it!
—Chris Demer
