Give Me Fever

Two weeks ago I didn't know who Andrea Barrett was; now I can't understand why she isn't more well known. Her stories have appeared in STORY, BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES and she won the National Book Award in 1996. So much for a thriving literary culture. Barrett's greatest strength is the way she incorporates fascinating historical and/or scientific details into her tales, yet the details never clog the story and her characters always remain squarely in the foreground. Vivid and vibrant, Barrett has a knack for bringing the joys of scientific, historical and personal discovery to life on the page. The title story, "Ship Fever" is a novella that depicts the life of a doctor at a quarantine station at Gross Isle. Barrett relates with heartbreaking pathos and extraordinary detail the condition of Irish emigrants fleeing the famine and arriving in Canada half-starved and wracked with typhus or worse. As grim as it sounds it's a love story of incredible compassion. These are tales for anyone who has given him or herself over to a subject and desperately, feverishly, wanted to learn everything there was to be learned. These are stories about men and women who put their books aside, fling open the library doors and hurl themselves headlong into the quivering unknown to reconcile their new knowledge with the world.