The story of Leo Marburg, Russian-German immigrant, and his stay at the state run curing hospital in the Adirdondacks just before the start of WWI. The residents are concentrated on recovering from tuberculosis and the war takes a back seat to this in the early stages of the novel. Wealthy Miles, who is in a nearby private cure house, initiates weekly sessions where patients can share interesting information regarding life experiences. Leo is attracted to nurses' aide Eudora; Naomi (another aide and Eudora's friend) is attracted to Leo; and Miles is attracted to Naomi. This leads to circumstances that cause a fire at the state facility at Tamarack and destroys lives and relationships. Excellent storytelling as well as history and science. Barrett is terrific! ( )

Barrett is all about setting. This novel, like the others of hers I have read, is about scientists and science, takes place at a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks during World War I.

Leo Marburg had studied chemistry in the Ukraine and Russia. He came to New York six years before and has only had menial jobs since. When he got sick, alone, without a family, he was sent to a large state-run sanitarium. The sanitarium starts weekly classes for the edification of the staff and residents taught by them. But a rich older patient from a private cure home falls in love with a young townie. She falls in love with Leo, Leo falls in love with her best friend.

“He felt -- this astonished him --grateful. Not since he was a boy had he had time to think and study and look at the world and himself; and although throughout his stay up here he‘d been sick, sometimes terribly so… at the same time these past months had been astonishing. Food, shelter, books, the forest, our Wednesday gatherings. The world, unclouded. Eudora.” ( )

Isolated and insulated from the world in their cocoons, the TB patients at a state sanitarium tell their story. It is a small and shameful story of xenophobia and misunderstanding among those who by their ostracism from the world and their families should have done better; should have been less placidly herded into their hissing gossipy little groups instead of standing up bravely for a companion.
It is the eve of WWII, the Great War, and American cities rest on an underpinning of immigrant laborers to do the hard and dirty work. Most of these immigrants are from central Europe, Russia and other Slavic regions and from Italy; they are short and swarthy and they do not resemble the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic stock that inhabits the New York town and as such are viewed with suspicion. Later even the Germans, despite their love of the German gifts to culture, such as the three B's or the university system as we know it, are thrust into outsider status by the war. Everyone is an outsider, except for a select few who by birthright are True Americans, and even those with impeccable credentials are on shaky ground should they adopt the wrong attitude. This isolation fuels misunderstanding and cruelty and later pain and death.
The lack of connection hides the rich history behind these patients who live such a regimented life as to stifle any individuality. That this common laborer in a sugar factory should have been an aspiring chemist who read with more than journeyman’s delight the texts that uncover the mysteries of the atomic bond never occurs to anyone except one of the great and wonderful characters in this book, a nearly self taught and horribly disfigured radiologist. Even when we are given a glimpse of the life behind the diseased body of one of the TB patients, it is so glancing and distorted as to not really sink in. A patient has a daughter he cares so much for that he runs away from the sanitarium to see her when she is ill, and yet we know nothing of her, nor of him after he leaves the magic circle, although we know that this was an act that was at best illegal and more likely mortally dangerous.
The silence is broken by a tubercular patient who is in a very different position from the warehoused ones in state custody. He is a man of privilege, also with a past he remembers fondly, but with a present that is so comfortable that he swims in self righteousness, with all the ugly attendant follies of self-righteousness, fussiness, arrogance, selfishness, myopia, insensitivity and lack of imagination, to name a few. He brings the whole world to a head by stirring up this quiet pool of people with a weekly round circle to improve their minds. It gets out of hand, the human mind being a damnable thing once loosed and there is love and longing as a result, and people get hurt, people die even. He and his ilk, in high dudgeon, indulge themselves in the worst sort of xenophobic jingoism in the war effort and to what end? He is wrong about so many things from the prospect of a young girl loving him to the threat of the local choir director to the war movement to the need to remove reading material so that there will not be sedition among the dying.
There is hope here in this gloomy and cold climate. There is a doctor that stands up to the threats and the girl who finds that she is more than she knew. There is a discovery of ability and delight among the patients. This is, though, a completely dead end place, an isolated dead zone. The main characters, the two nearly lovers, who we admire and care about, can only save themselves by escape to another, safer place than these toxic places where people came to recover, except so many died, another hidden story.
Barrett writes so well about human issues and science. I have enjoyed everything of hers that I have read. She does not use an extra word. Things are what they are and then more which is better than too much on the surface. Emotions run high and yet people deal with the life they are given. There is nothing to shock or surprise and yet the story is rich and the telling of it and the setting have a vitality and an immediacy that makes this a wonderful read. ( )

a book chock full of all kinds of information ranging from science to social history and full of pertinent and relevant topics for today. excellent writing and editing. However, it is somewhat dull. It never achieves any level of emtional attachmenet that is dissappointing given the so relevant subject matter. ( )

Written from the perspective of one of the TB patients that were at the sanitorium "getting the cure". Well written, characters were believable and the historical content was well resesarched. I would recommend this for a book club. ( )