Bent Northrop Memorial Library

Roth's "Nemesis" is the story of a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.

"In the winter of 1918, the coldest the American Midwest had ever endured, history's most lethal influenza virus was born. Over the next year it flourished, killing as many as 100 million people. It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years, more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century. There were many echoes of the Middle Ages in 1918: victims turned blue-black and priests...

Type 1 diabetes, Crohn's disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis-all these increasingly common illnesses are autoimmune diseases in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissues or nervous system. Equally alarming, as journalist Nakazawa tells us, is researchers' growing suspicion that autism may be an autoimmune disease, brought on in part by genetic predisposition, exposure of young bodies to man-made chemicals and perhaps viral triggers....