Frimbo is an admirable erudite, reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, while the “closed room” scenario with a handful of characters evokes Agatha Christie. The writing is accessible, the rendering of Harlem accents remarkable, and the accurate references to state-of-the art forensic medicine, using anatomy and chemistry, are engaging. The conversations between Archer and Frimbo explore the nature of science, faith, and psychology. 

Some passages contain philosophical observations: ‘Pure faith in anything is mysticism. Our very faith in reason is a kind of mysticism’ (p. 214).  
 
Fisher was an African-American physician-author whose clever novel contains only African-American characters, including the physician and the detective. Specialized in radiology, he lived most of his life in Harlem, but he had studied medicine at Howard University. The author of many short stories and plays, he was also a gifted musician and composer. He at died at the age of 37 from an abdominal cancer attributed to his work with X-Rays.   

The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem
Rudolph Fisher  

Miscellaneous Original edition 1932  
Publisher University of Michigan Press 
Place Published Ann Arbor MI 
Edition 1992 
Page Count 316 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.   
Web image by Salah Ait Mokhtar 

Henry’s severe illness and his difficulties accessing treatment prompted Green to contemplate the horrifying statistics of tuberculosis and the paradox of our extensive knowledge about it. More than one million people still die every year from this ancient disease; yet the bacterial cause was elucidated a century and a half ago, and effective treatments have been around since the 1950s. Barring eradication, the germs mutate and become resistant. Given dire living conditions, it spreads. Effective therapy can be prohibitively expensive. “The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not” (p. 5). People die where cures cannot be obtained. 

History is woven though Henry’s story, but so are politics, culture, and economics: the discoveries, the 19^th-century romanticization of ‘wasting away,’ the hard realities of pharmaceutical development and delivery. Henry has survived, become healthy and an inveterate TikToker and youtuber. He even has an episode on the power of storytelling. But other people that we encounter through this tale have died. 

We still have tuberculosis because statistics de-personify it, and geography allows ignoring it. Green uses Henry’s story to invite us to ‘[t]hink about how rare and precious humans are, and how many of them you get to worry for and care about. Then if you can, find a way to multiply that 1,250,000 times’ (p. 189).  

The book flows easily in language that is clear and accessible, a tribute to Green’s experience in writing young-adult fiction. In the end, without denying the benefits of medical interventions, he calls for a focus on the real cause of tuberculosis: injustice—tolerated and unchallenged. ‘Ultimately,’ he writes, ‘we are the cause’ (p. 184).  

Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
John Green
New York: Penguin/Crash Course Books
2025
ISBN 9780525556572 

Web image created by Medhum.org

Carrie Coon, Letts’ wife, plays Agnes White, a lonely server living in an Oklahoma motel who falls in love with Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood), an AWOL Gulf veteran. Peter becomes increasingly convinced that he is the subject of clandestine experiments, and that he is infested with government-planted bugs. These bugs are, of course, invisible, yet he drags Agnes with him into a seeming folie à deux—a bedlam of flypaper, aluminum foil, and bug zappers.  

Peter’s delusions (and, in turn, Agnes’s) eventually cross a line into a realm in which logic no longer applies. By spilling so far into excess, even occasionally veering into bizarre spoofiness, Bug risks trivializing Peter’s paranoia—a risk especially fraught now that the part is played for the first time by a Black actor.  

Initially, Peter cites a real case of government experimentation: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which poor Black sharecroppers were never told they had syphilis. The experiment ran from 1932 until 1972—long after penicillin became the standard treatment in the mid-1940s. To observe how the disease naturally progressed, researchers deliberately withheld the antibiotic, ending the study only after a press leak. 

This gross violation of ethics is widely believed to have damaged Black Americans’ trust in the medical establishment. But according to medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington [1], “that narrative is flawed and untrue.” While Tuskegee certainly contributes to that distrust, the larger impetus is “four centuries of abuse in the medical arena,” which Washington chronicles in her 2007 book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. “In fact, one study indicated that African Americans who had never heard of Tuskegee were more likely to fear vaccine administration and medication design.” 

What if Bug had dialed down Peter’s paranoia and explored it within this broader historical context instead of reinforcing the singularity of Tuskegee? Overemphasizing Tuskegee because of its infamy (or because of one’s ignorance) serves to obscure other historical ethics violations as well as systemic racial inequities that persist today. For instance, what if Peter struggled to access mental healthcare because of structural barriers? 

In her 2021 book Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent, Washington mentions an experimental anthrax vaccine that soldiers were required to receive beginning in 1998. “Soldiers of all races were affected,” she writes, “but Blacks were overrepresented because they constituted 12.3 percent of Americans, but were 24.5 percent of the 1.7 million ground troops deployed to the Gulf in 1990 and 26.2 percent of Army reservists in 2001—twice their representation in the population at large, and so at twice the risk of being forced into military research.” 

Many service members reported autoimmune conditions after getting the jab, but the Pentagon attributed their symptoms to “emotional issues,” Washington continues. “The military subsumed vaccine-related illnesses under the nebulous symptomatology of ‘Gulf War Syndrome.’” What if Bug had dramatized that ‘nebulous symptomatology’? 

Peter also references another example of government research: the Edgewood Arsenal experiments. After World War II, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps tested chemical weapons on American soldiers at a secluded research facility on the Chesapeake Bay, exposing volunteers to more than 250 different chemicals, including LSD, mustard gas, and sarin. The studies ended after researchers were accused of ethical transgressions, including issues with informed consent and recruitment. Archival footage, unearthed in a 2022 documentary, shows men “going temporarily blind, reduced to babbling or completely dysfunctional logs, or worse, ready to commit violence upon themselves.” [2] 

Washington argues in Carte Blanche that “the medical crimes that were denounced and punished at Nuremberg have American analogues.” 

“Although not perfect parallels,” she notes, “they share a violent, nonconsensual, and largely racial disparate nature, as well as the frequent invocation of military expedience.” 

In this light, Peter’s condemnation of his doctors as neo-Nazis feels less outlandish than the play permits. Letts may hint that Peter is not entirely psychotic—that his madness holds some truth. But that seed never grows.  

The play ultimately bubbles over (spoiler alert: self-harm, violence, and fire). A future iteration of the three-decades-old play, if there is one, might benefit from taking Peter’s delusions more seriously—and leaving open the possibility that they are, in fact, real. 

Bug will get under your skin, but to what end? 

Bug, through March 8th at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York; manhattantheatreclub.com/shows/2025-26-season/bug/.  

[1] “Harriet A. Washington on the Narrative Around Vaccine Hesitancy in the African American Community: In Conversation with Andrew Keen.” Keen On from Literary Hub, 19 Mar. 2021, lithub.com/harriet-a-washington-on-the-narrative-around-vaccine-hesitancy-in-the-african-american-community/. 
[2] Simonpillai, Radheyan. “‘It Affected a Great Number of People’: Inside the World of Shocking Military Drug Experiments.” The Guardian, 9 June 2022, theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jun/09/dr-delirium-and-the-edgewood-experiments-documentary. 

Web image by Matthew Murphy.

Conditions change once Sweet Home’s owner dies of a stroke and his widow brings in her brother-in-law and his young nephews to help run Sweet Home; the small liberties granted to the enslaved people are revoked by the new leadership, and cruelties ensue. The enslaved people, including Halle and a man named Paul D, plot to escape north; however, Sethe and her children are the only ones who succeed in doing so, only after she is violated by the nephews and brutally whipped by the brother-in-law for informing him of the assault. These events and Sethe’s flight are complicated by her near-full-term pregnancy. Approaching death from exhaustion and exposure, she is saved by a white girl who helps Sethe give birth. Her daughter is named Denver after the contextually benevolent white girl.  

Carrying her newborn, Sethe arrives at 124, greeted by her other three children, into the care of Baby Suggs. The bittersweet happiness of her arrival without Halle is marred one month later by the arrival of a team intending to reclaim Sethe and her kids for Sweet Home. Rather than allow herself and her children to be forced back into slavery, Sethe intends to commit infanticide and suicide, succeeding in the murder of her older daughter. This action effectively prevents them from being taken, and Sethe is exonerated of her charges. Despite this, her act of desperation crushes her family, eventually leading to Baby Suggs’ death and to the flight of her sons from the household. Eighteen years later, Paul D arrives at 124. He begins a relationship with Sethe and manages to evict the poltergeist.  

Soon thereafter, a strange woman arrives by the name of Beloved, the word Sethe had engraved on her child’s tombstone. Sethe is initially unaware of the stranger’s origins, and Paul D is effectively forced out by the new arrival. Once Beloved’s identity as the deceased child is understood, she, Sethe, and Denver become wrapped up in each other, blurring the lines of their identity. Sethe loses her job, but Denver manages to extricate herself to find work. Hearing of the family’s plight at the hands of the “unholy” Beloved, thirty black women of the area band together to purge 124 of her presence. Beloved leaves without a trace. Paul D eventually returns to 124, and memories of Beloved slowly fade into oblivion. 

Beloved is a pure work of art. Toni Morrison crafted a brilliant piece fueled by the lived experiences of enslaved people’s descendants in America and informed by the temporal proximity of the ratification of thirteenth amendment. The summary outlined above fails to capture the impact of the work’s nonlinear form, both in time and perspective. Flashbacks seamlessly interweave with the driving plot. Not only are the past and present difficult to distinguish, but this intermingling also elevates the past in status compared to the present, allowing the past to rival––and often exceed––the present in narrative importance. Time becomes a unique character, one whose primary achievement is the marring of other characters’ physical beings. Through this lens, the recapitulation of Sethe’s tree scars mirrors the historical impact of slavery on the modern-day United States. This context is further validated by the work’s inspiration, the life of Margaret Garner, an African- American enslaved woman who escaped, was recaptured, and who murdered her daughter while being returned to the South. 

Toni Morrison’s mastery of figurative language builds upon the nonlinearity of the piece. Her writing is powerfully displayed through allegories, the most notable of which is found on pages 248-252. Through Beloved’s perspective, Morrison blends hell and slave ships into one entity. This same section of the novel further unifies the perspectives of Beloved, Sethe, and Denver through a mélange of emotion and perception.  

The relevance of this piece to contemporary American politics and social issues is profound and disturbing. American history continues to discredit the experiences of people of color, particularly those of who identify as Black or African-American. This novel demands that we confront the United States’ history of racial oppression. Its magical realism provides new dimension to a historical narrative, allowing for greater imaginative accessibility to the meaning behind its story. As a last powerful image, I refer to the biblically paralleled coming of the four horsemen to “reclaim” Sethe: the sheriff assumes responsibility of reinforcing the dehumanization of Sethe and “addressing” her perceived cultural, psychological, and racialized aberrancy through punishment sans reformation.  

Miscellaneous 

Beloved
Toni Morrison

Awards
National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (1987); Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1988); American Book Award (1988); Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (1988); Frederic G. Melcher Book Award (1988)  

Publisher Vintage 
Place Published United States 
Edition 2004 
Page Count 324 

Originally published on September 16, 1987 by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database . 
Web image by Alex Conti