Review by New York Times Review
LAUREN HELPER'S death-haunted medical thriller begins in December 1941, just three days after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. Claire Shipley, a photojournalist working for the phenomenally successful Life magazine, has come to the Rockefeller Institute in New York to record one of the earliest triais of a new medication called penicillin. Highly effective in experiments involving bacterial infections in mice, this substance is about to be tried on a human. Will the drug work? Or will it have serious, potentially lethal, side effects? For the patient and the doctors, there's no real choice: this experiment is a desperate last chance for a 37-year-old man who had been robustly healthy until a seemingly harmless scratch, acquired during a game of tennis, rapidly developed into a life-threatening infection. Claire's assignment introduces her to the world of medical research - and to Jamie Stanton, the dedicated physician who will administer the penicillin, along with his younger sister, Tia, a mycologist who serves as his chief assistant. These highly attractive, hard-working siblings are motivated by a personal tragedy: their parents perished in the great influenza epidemic that swept the country just after World War I. Claire Shipley has suffered deep losses too, but hers are of more recent vintage. Seven and a half years earlier, her 3-year-old daughter died of a blood infection after an apparently minor accident, a circumstance not unlike that of the patient she has just photographed. In the aftermath of her daughter's death, Claire's marriage collapsed, leaving her the sole custodian of her surviving child, an 8-year-old son. Claire's stepfather and mother have also died. For her, the last 10 years have been a "decade of death." The day after Claire's initial photo shoot, she returns to find the critically ill patient looking fully recovered. He's awake and alert, freshly bathed and shaved, and reading the newspaper. But, as Tia Stanton explains, this miracle may be short-lived. If a relapse occurs, there will be no way to save the patient because there is no more medication. Penicillin grows agonizingly slowly, harvested from small droplets that leak from a kind of green mold. The hospital's supply is being cultivated in makeshift rows of sideways-turned milk bottles, even in bedpans, but the patient has received all the available supply. Sure enough, within hours he begins to fail, and by the end of the day he is dead. Belfer uses the urgency of the Stantons' mission - finding a means of quickly mass-producing penicillin - to add drama to the romantic attraction that develops between Claire and Jamie. America has just become a country at war, with soldiers soon to be dying from infected battlefield wounds. The novel's tension increases as Jamie is called away by the government to oversee and coordinate penicillin projects in laboratories throughout the nation. Back in New York, Tia continues her own research, which may put her in personal danger. And as the race for lucrative pharmaceutical patents on penicillin's so-called cousins heats up, Claire's father, a wealthy tycoon, begins to play a significant role in the ever widening narrative. Beifer's first novel, "City of Light," delineated the social and political tensions of Buffalo, N.Y., at the beginning of the age of electricity. "A Fierce Radiance" is similarly ambitious, combining medical and military history with commercial rivalry, espionage and thwarted love. Belfer clearly knows her scientific material. She also knows how to turn esoteric information into an adventure story, and how to tell that story very well. Belfer's novel combines medical and military history with a wartime romance. Maggie Scarf is the author of "September Songs" and "Intimate Partners." She is writing a book about remarriage.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 20, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Through the story of divorced 36-year-old Life photojournalist Claire Shiply, Belfer blends fact and fiction to describe the development of penicillin as a weapon of war in the 1940s. Seeing an early trial of the green-mold medicine in which a dying man is miraculously cured of his infection, then dies when the medication runs out Shiply is drawn to the story because of the earlier death of her young daughter from septicemia. She is drawn, too, to head researcher Dr. James Stanton, who is soon tapped to be national scientific coordinator to provide penicillin to treat battlefield infections. While Stanton travels to war zones, Claire is asked by government officials to watch for pharmaceutical companies neglecting production of unpatented penicillin to develop cousin antibacterials, even after her wealthy father has taken over one of the companies involved. Belfer (City of Light, 2003) combines life-and-death scenarios, romance, murder, and wartime reality at home and abroad, while satirizing industrialists who profit by dubious means and salve their consciences through philanthropy; and she warns that resistance to antibiotics could return us to the era when otherwise healthy adults died from a scratch on the knee. An engrossing and ambitious novel that vividly portrays a critical time in American history.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Penicillin operates as the source of romance, murder, and melodrama in Belfer's (City of Light) evocative WWII-era novel. When Life magazine sends strikingly beautiful photographer Claire Shipley to report on a promising new medication made from green mold, Claire, 36, the single mother of a young son, who lost her daughter to blood poisoning eight years before, is moved by the drug's potential to save lives. She also becomes smitten with resident doctor James Stanton, a man with two interests: penicillin and bedding Claire. But as the war casualties pile up, penicillin becomes an issue of national security and the politics of the drug's production threaten to disrupt the pair's lust-fueled romance, especially when James is sent abroad to oversee human trials of the drug. The pharmaceutical companies-including one owned by Claire's father-realize the financial potential in penicillin, which leads to a hodgepodge of soapy plot twists: suspicious deaths, amnesia, illness, exploitation, and espionage. Belfer handily exploits Claire's photo shoots to add historical texture to the book, and the well-researched scenes bring war-time New York City to life, capturing the anxiety-ridden period. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Thirty-six-year-old Claire Shipley is a most modern woman in 1941. A gifted, focused photographer for LIFE magazine, a divorced single mother, and fearless in the pursuit of her career, she stumbles upon an enormous story when she is sent to cover the use of an experimental, hard-to-produce drug, penicillin, on infections. Having lost one child to septicemia, she is fiercely protective of her son. When her original story is killed, she is asked by the U.S. government to pursue it as a patriot, keeping an eye on the big pharmaceutical companies who are supposed to be mass-producing patent-free penicillin for use on the battlefield but are really working on the much more profitable cousin drugs. VERDICT With an exquisite artist's eye for detail that puts readers right in the middle of New York City and the World War II fronts and incorporating all the elements of a hot, sprawling, page-turning romance-not to mention espionage, murder, crime-scene deceptions, big business intrigue, and family estrangements-Belfer (City of Light) once again blends fiction and facts with riveting results.-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A novel from Belfer (City of Lights, 1999) about the race to develop penicillin and other antibiotics during World War II.Claire, a photographer with Life magazine, is sent to cover a groundbreaking discovery by scientists at Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute. A mold seems to have generated a lifesaving drug, and doctors at the Institute are testing it on patients suffering from infections. Claire is deeply invested in her assignmentlong ago, she lost a daughter to blood poisoning. She's drawn to Jamie, the handsome doctor administering the trials. Now divorced, single-handedly raising son Charlie and tentatively healing her long estrangement from her Wall Street kingpin father, Rutherford, Claire is shocked when patients on the verge of recovery diesupplies of penicillin, grown haphazardly in bottles and bedpans, are too sparse for a complete course of treatment. When the United States enters the war after Pearl Harbor, pharmaceutical companies, including some still-familiar players like Merck and Pfizer, compete to be the first to mass-produce penicillin. The success of the war effort and, of course, scads of money are at stake. Jamie's sister Tia, a Rockefeller mycologist, is investigating other antimicrobial agents found in soil, known as penicillin's "cousins." Tia has just isolated a particularly promising specimen when she falls from a cliff near the Instituteor was she pushed? The sample she was cataloguing, notable for its startling blue color, disappears. The government, with the cooperation of Life publisher Henry Luce, enlists Claire to document the progress Pharma is making on the penicillin front. Rutherford has an entrepreneurial interest in patentable antibiotics. When Nick, a doctor from an impoverished immigrant background, who had flirted with Tia, offers to sell Rutherford a strikingly cerulean "cousin," Rutherford bites, but now he's keeping secrets from Claire. Jamie, who's engaged to Claire, returns from service in North Africa to find his romance disrupted by the fact that his prospective father-in-law might have ordered his sister's murder.A ponderously paced historical thriller.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
