Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Wickett's Remedy

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Wickett's Remedy

Myla Goldberg is the author of the bestselling Bee Season; an essay collection, Time’s Magpie, which explores all her favorite places in Prague, where she lived for a year in the early nineties; and Wickett’s Remedy which grew out of her fascination with the 1918 influenza epidemic. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, cartoonist Jason Little,  and their daughter.

Did you know?

• Despite the misleading name, the "Spanish Flu" epidemic of 1918-1919 was first identified in early March 1918 at a US military camp in Kansas; by October it had spread worldwide.  By the time it died out 18 months later it is estimated that 2.5-5% of the world's population had died and 20% had been effected.  Estimates of the numbers killed vary widely, from about 25 million to 100 million; with about 500,000-675,000 of those being in the USA (more than all wars of the 20th century), 200,000 in the UK and 17 million in India.
   
• Goldberg's first book, Bee Season revolves around a national spelling bee contest.  The earliest known use of the phrase "spelling bee" goes back to at least 1825.  However, the United States National Spelling Bee was not started until 1925 when someone at the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper had the bright idea of torturing generations of children to come with a national contest.  In 1941 the Scripps Howard News Service acquired the sponsorship and renamed it the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee.

Filed under

This "beyond the book article" relates to Wickett's Remedy. It originally ran in September 2005 and has been updated for the October 2006 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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