52 Books in 52 Weeks: Book 44: "A Fierce Radiance" by Lauren Belfer

What would it be like to live in a world where your little girl could fall and skin her knee, get infected with staph bacteria, and there's nothing you can do but watch as the infection takes her life in a matter of days?  Or you catch the flu, it moves into your lungs and becomes pneumonia, and there's no such thing as penicillin?  

We don't have to go back very far in our history - pre WWII - to find such a time.  This historical fiction novel is set in WWII.  Claire Shipley is a photographer working for Life magazine and she's been assigned to follow the story of the development and testing of this new medicine called penicillin.   Even if it does work as they hope, there is almost no chance they will be able to produce enough of it.  That is, until the government learns of penicillin's potential to heal the wounded on the front lines and steps in to take control and patent rights away from the pharmaceutical companies.

Lauren Belfer does an excellent job of winding a medical thriller, a murder mystery and a romance into the fabric of this historical fiction novel.  I found this to be a very enjoyable read.  It was also very informative about this time in history, and thought provoking.  As the author concludes in her notes at the end of the book:

Penicillin and the antibiotics that followed have changed the lives of virtually every human being in the past seventy years. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics developed from the beginning, however. Today, resistance is a major medical problem. Unless antibiotic use is curtailed, or new drugs are developed, humanity could easily return to the era when otherwise healthy adults died from a scratch on the knee.

Sojourner