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Title details for The Leper by Steve Thayer - Available

The Leper

by Steve Thayer
Corey M. Snow
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
John Eric Severson is a veteran of the First World War, a Marine Corps captain who once got lost in a forest behind enemy lines and unknowingly led his men into a leper colony. Now, five years later, he is an idealistic schoolteacher in a tough, working-class neighborhood where earning a high school diploma is something most of his students can only dream about. Severson vows to educate every one of them. But he quickly learns there is one student the tall, handsome Swede cannot control. The lovely Bernice DuFresne. Her wit and charm are no match for him, and halfway through the school year he swears at himself for falling in love with one of his own students. Their love affair is of the highest risk, but they manage to hold on to their secret until the fateful day he is diagnosed with the dreaded disease and literally chased from the school.
Stalked by the ghosts of his past, Severson begins an odyssey that takes him down the Mississippi River and into the swamps of Louisiana . . . to a colony so miserable its existence is only rumored. His desperate escapes from this hellhole become murderous as he tries to return to a place and time, and to a woman, that he loved. Finally, banished to the Hawaiian island of Molokai, and still hoping to one day return home, he becomes a leprosy settlement sheriff . . . and a living legend.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 29, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781618038104
      • File size: 338850 KB
      • Duration: 11:45:56

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from July 28, 2008
      Who wants to read a novel about a leper? Anyone who wants to be enlightened, educated and entertained by bestseller Thayer's (The Weatherman
      ) unusual but awe-inspiring hero. After stumbling on a French-German leper village while serving as a marine captain during WWI, John Severson takes a healthy little girl to safety while his near-mutinous men are ordered to return to the front. After an inquiry ends favorably, Severson returns home to St. Paul, Minn., where he becomes a high school math teacher and is secretly engaged to his favorite student. His happiness shatters after a routine medical check identifies him as a leper. In the wake of the Spanish flu epidemic, this means forced quarantine at Louisiana's Witch Tree leprosarium, which Thayer describes in disturbing and sometimes lurid detail. After escaping from Witch Tree, Severson winds up as the sheriff of Hawaii's Molokai leper colony, a relentless crusader for Hansen's disease sufferers, whose rights as U.S. citizens were too long compromised by fear. This book deserves a wide readership.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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