Yesteryears Book Club discusses the California history you didn’t learn in school.

Please come join us as we discuss David Randall’s book about a forgotten chapter of history: the epidemic that almost destroyed San Francisco.

March, 1900. For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His death would have passed unnoticed had a city health officer not spotted a swollen black lymph node on his groin.

Bubonic plague in an American city? To local press, railroad barons, and elected officials, such a possibility was inconceivable—and inconvenient. As the powerful and moneyed mounted a cover-up, it fell to beleaguered health officer Rupert Blue to try to save a city that did not want to be rescued — as well as a nation ignorant of the spreading threat.

In the tradition of Erik Larson and Steven Johnson, Randall spins a spellbinding account of Blue’s race to understand the disease and contain its spread—the only hope of saving San Francisco, and the broader United States, from a gruesome fate.