Annotated Bibliography (ever continuing)

NB: This is a living, growing list and entries marked with an * are those I read after I finished the game.

Boyer, Anne. The Undying. MacMillan, 2020.

• Boyer's a poet and an academic, and this potent document of her cancer journey—one which she was not expected to survive–reflects that discipline and care with language.
  
  Her interactions with caregivers and associates informed as much of You’re Sick’s Hearts cards as did watching my mother care for both my aunt (who succumbed to cancer barely past 40) and my father (who died at 75). Of equal importance to You’re Sick were the questions, issues, conversations I wished Boyer wrote about—effectively demanding I ask myself about expectations we place on those sick.

Daniel, Thomas M. Captain of Death: The Story of Tuberculosis. University of Rochester Press, 1997.

• My primer to the history of TB diagnosis and treatment. Most noteworthy to me for the fact that even the drug sensitive TB bacteria pretty much shrug penicillin and other antibiotics with a wide range of effectiveness. Ask a TB patient what they’re taking, expect a list–and one that changes over time.

Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. Hill & Wang, 2002.

• In our COVID era, the discussions of inoculation and vaccination resistance have particular impact. After all, at its most solipsistic and unflattering, You're Sick is boast of and apology for my good fortune: even beyond race, class, and sex, I live in Los Angeles, where enough people were masked and vaccinated for there to be  a bed when I needed one the most. (More about You're Sick and COVID in this devlog.)

*Enkh-Amgalan, Handaa. Stigmatized. New Degree Press, 2021.

• Had I read this before writing my game, this may have supplanted, or at least complemented Sontag's work as the foundational text, making it much more  a game about TB as opposed to its broader focus. Would that be a good thing? Unsure. Enkh-Amgalan's writing is as earnest as it is well documented. She doesn't blink, and never surrenders--especially reassuring for book which at its core covers the time immediately before 2016 continues through the COVID-19 pandemic, 

*Goetz, Thomas. The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis. Avery, 2014

• This book often feels like a hodge-podge of marketing hooks, basic historical information, and whatever happened to interest the author that day unless you focus on the main title. The core of Remedy is just that--the importance of remedies, and how thought and action changed in the search for them. The actors matter, keep the book grounded and not so dry, but it could be called: Remedy: Germ Theory, the Scientitific Method, the Public and the Medical Establishment. Yep, if I were in the marketing department, I'd lean toward Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Killer Bacillus too.   

Institute of Medicine. Ending Neglect: The Elimination of Tuberculosis in the United States. Institute of Medicine 2020. 

• So much has happened, and all bad,  on the national and international scene--9/11 and the U.S. response, 2016, COVID-19--in just the two decades since these recommendations were made, but they smell of neither naivete or wishful thinking in hindsight. A valuable blend of case studies, concrete recommendations, and discussions about perspectives. 

Krishnan, Vidya. Phantom Plague. Public Affairs. 2021.

• Rage, followed by tears, followed by a mixture of rage and tears was my reaction reading this book, which devotes significant time to non-TB specific stupidity (such as the pushback against washing your hands when delivering a baby) before it delves into the main topic.
  
  On an even more personal level, I recall one of the nurses attending to me during my hospitalization, one who came from a region discussed in Krishnan’s book telling me, “Where I come from, we just put all the TB patients together” [And let natural selection sort them out, clearly implied.]

Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It. Atria, 2001.

• I read this decades ago, but what stuck with me was the content about cultural blindspots, historical forgetting. When I was first diagnosed with TB, a long-time associate asked, "Do people still get that?" (And no, I did not respond, "Well, at least one person did, dumbass") Peaky Blinders fans can't forget the TB storyline, but how many remember the major character who died offscreen from the influenza?

* Lougheed, Kathryn. Catching Breath. Bloomsbury Sigma. 2017. 

• The real triumph of this book is how Lougheed interweaves so much hard science and historical fact with personal observations in prose that is lively, heartfelt, equal parts respectful and irreverant. Years ago I taught undergraduate technical writing and science writing for non-scientists and wish I had something half this skillfully executed to show my students. As informative as it is engaging.

Mann. Charles 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Vintage, 2006.

• Yes, I know,  "When you’re a hammer (or sick with–hammerosis?), everything looks like a nail." It's not just tunnel vision: You’re Sick, is in part about responsibility if not outright blame and there's a significant amount of material in this book on smallpox and syphilis and other diseases—their transmission and the reactions to them—significant especially given the fact that Mann’s work is ostensibly about the time "Before Columbus".

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by Woods, John. Penguin Random House, 1996.

• Yes, effective medication,  6000 miles distance and over 100 years time (from both authorship and setting), as well as my inability to digest much of the lavish meals described in the novel separate my tuberculosis treatment from that of its characters…
  
  …but that said, outside of the antibiotics, my tuberculosis experience was infinitely closer to that of Mann's characters than to the millions of those whose active TB treatment was concurrent with my own. I've touched on such matters in this devlog and tried to make You're Sick acknowledge this discrepancy without dwelling on it.

* Reichman, Lee B. and Tanne, Janice Hopkins. Timebomb: The Glocal Epidemic of Multi-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis. McGraw-Hill. 2002. 

• This book is primarily, but far from exclusively about TB care in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia--(NB: one possibility source of my TB infection was a Gorbachev-era summer I spent I Moscow). What was scary at the time of its writing is doubly enraging and heartbreaking now, given what's happened with Ukraine, the politicization of even the CDC, and more.  In retrospect, the title is and cover are both hyperbolic and a grave understatement.  

Shah, Sonia. The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled HumanKind for over 500,000 years.  Sarah Crichton Books, 2010.

• Malaria is not one of the diseases directly informing You're Sick, but my understanding of the books that directly affected the game was greatly enriched by the perspectives in public health, collective willpower, and the politics and economics involved with a disease associated with the global south–and the poor everywhere. I think of my own upbringing, privileged even by the standards of white America, where what we learned about malaria was primarily in biology: Those with sickle-cell anemia (i.e. primarily Africans) were less affected by the virus because their inefficient funky-shaped RBC's were harder for the virus to exploit.
  
  And then there's the talk about chloronique and misplaced worship of it decades before COVID.

Shah, Sonia. Pandemic. 2016

• What was still undiagnosed TB in me went from a lingering odd-sounding cough to coughing up blood about two months after I qualified (and received) the COVID vaccine. This book  was written four years before the COVID pandemic, and repeatedly stressed the danger of future H1N1 viruses.  It was a damn good thing I read this book while I was undergoing treatment, so I was too weak for the neighbors or even my wife or our bunnies to hear me screaming whenever I read a prescient passage.
  
  
  

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Picador USA, 2001.

• Too important to You're Sick to not mention in the main text of the game.  I'm at the older end of GenX range, as the cultural sexual zeitgeist  transitioned from herpes–fodder for stand-up comics– to the AIDS (i.e. "gay cancer") panic. And as for cancer, it was during my aunt's treatment that I first discovered my dislike for the language of combat—(So if Kris dies, does that make her a loser? Weak?  A coward? ). This, read during my TB treatment, was critical to my applying context, organization to my thinking.