WWTBAM Bored

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-wan ... 0911042832

My second cousin wrote this novella. Saw him yesterday at a funeral. He has had various writing jobs/teaching college freshman English classes.

Book is a coming of age story set in the Great Depression. He said we will recognize some of the names as he pulled some names from from family history-not the the character is based on those people-he just used the name.

Main character is "Alvi"-named for our Great Uncle who worked on the Alcan during the war.

Another main character is "Skreiver" named for a family friend who was a long-time bachelor who was murdered in the 80's by somebody who was probably looking for hidden money. I will have to ask my dad, but Skreiver was not the neatest person in the world and I think my dad talks about seeing sheep in Skreiver's house. Sounds bad, but probably not in the bestiality sense(LOL).

Spock says:

I think my dad talks about seeing sheep in Skreiver's house.

According to Jared Diamond, who wrote that book (OK, I saw the PBS TV show) on health & civilization (Guns, Germs & Steel), Europeans used to keep their animals close, sometimes in their house. (Presumably from the theory to follow Asians & Africans did too, but I don't think he specifies that.) Natives of the American continents, both north & south, did not.

So when the Europeans came to the Americas they brought a lot of germs with them that they had developed immunity to because those animals they snuggled with (OK, kept on the hearth anyway) had versions of various diseases those germs brought.

But because the germs were entirely new to North/South American natives, those indigenous people got clobbered, & in many cases groups got completely wiped out by them.

Up until this hypothesis that "animal disease germs are related to human disease germs", you had to think that North/South American natives just had poor immune systems, to be hit that hard.


Its something we all have to realize when faced with a truly to-us-new disease, like Ebola; if we have never been exposed to anything remotely like it, we get hit awfully hard. We just can't count on "I usually don't get bad colds" to protect us. There's a reason we usually don't get bad colds; our immune system recognizes the germs, even if they've mutated from the last time it saw them & it can't clobber them completely.

By the way, I have to thank our buddy the internet for getting me Mr. Diamond's name & book title, which my increasingly deficient brain could not remember. So help me, all I could think of was "lawyers, guns & money" (my apologies, late Mr. Zevon). Googling "PBS + 'a couple other terms I can't now recreate!'" got me back to Mr. Diamond.

Ghost-Given your post above-You might be interested in "Spillover" by David Quammen. I think you would like it.

http://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal- ... 102&sr=1-1