快猫短视频

Skim this book at your peril. Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal and Ship Fever, which won the 1996 National Book Award, is on form. The Air We Breathe is 鈥渟low food鈥�, to be consumed morsel by morsel, as Barrett creates a world where the science is, mercifully, deeply embedded, and the writing unusually good.

The book is set in 1916 and centres on TB patients (many of them immigrants) in Tamarack State, a public sanatorium in the northern Adirondack mountains. With time on their hands and nothing to do but 鈥済et better鈥�, the inmates 鈥� as well as Miles Fairchild, a wealthy private patient 鈥� seize on the idea of a weekly discussion group.

Each character (some will be familiar from Ship Fever, Narwhal and Servants of the Map) has a connection with science: Fairchild runs the family cement firm but his passion is dinosaurs; Leo Marburg is a chemist originally from Russia, who yearns to return to work; Eudora MacEachern is a ward maid with ambitions to become an X-ray technician.

As the talks develop, the inmates 鈥� and later the staff 鈥� begin to learn about each other鈥檚 former lives and intellectual passions. Inevitably the outside world, in the throes of the first world war, reaches even the lonely world of Tamarack State. Suffice it to say, the story ends in tragedy, betrayal and prejudice.

Barrett鈥檚 characters are sparely but finely drawn, her science full of the excitement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The result is oddly moving, seen through the eyes of immigrants in search of justice, intellectual freedom and a better world.