A White Wind Blew: A Novel
Markert has interwoven three seemingly unrelated subjects—tuberculosis, music, and racism—into a hauntingly lyrical narrative with operatic overtones. Though he is unable to finish the requiem he is attempting to compose for his late wife, music is a balm for Dr. Wolfgang Pike’s troubled soul. Will it prove similarly effective for his patients—many of them incurably ill—at the Waverly Hills Tuberculosis Sanatorium, on the outskirts of Louisville, or will bigotry and fear, not to mention death, stand in the way? Forming a band and a choir with the assistance of a patient who just happens to be a former concert pianist, he is determined to unleash the physically and spiritually healing powers of music. Viewed as pariahs by the citizens of 1920s-era Louisville, who fear the ravages and the spread of the “white plague,” the unlucky residents of Waverly Hills apply a variety of coping mechanisms in order to come to grips with their individual and collective pain. A soaring tribute to the resiliency of life in the face of death. --Margaret Flanagan