Weisser, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Boston, delivers a history lesson with a novelist’s eye for detail, resurrecting a London that is filthy, fearful, and alive with commerce and contagion. She begins, fittingly, with Samuel Pepys in 1664, fretting over his brother Tom, who is “deadly ill—and which is worse, that his disease is the pox.” Pepys calls in a second opinion, desperate to erase the stain, and persuades himself (and others) that the initial diagnosis was wrong. Weisser compares this quiet act of denial to the families of gay men in the 1980s and ’90s who altered obituaries to disguise AIDS-related deaths. The “pox,” she explains, was an elastic term encompassing many afflictions, mostly sexual, and all freighted with moral reproach. Londoners hid their shame behind wigs, face patches, and mercury-based ointments, while the city thrummed with peddlers and backstreet quacks hawking cures. At Bartholomew Fair, she conjures dancing monkeys, Venetian girls on rope, and prostitutes offering a good time—and a bad infection, scenes echoed in the bawdy ballads of the age. Remedies mixed mercury, sassafras, and jalap; some involved digesting quicksilver and turpentine. Edward Jewel’s “Incomparable Extractum Humorale” was sold in 23 shops across London, from grocers to cheesemongers—a forerunner of modern pharmaceutical branding. Each chapter opens with a vignette—a maid hiding pills under her bed, a wife using her infection as evidence in court of her husband’s infidelity—and together they trace the disease from street to sickroom to courtroom. The author draws heavily on John Marten’s A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (1707), one of the few substantial sources available to her. “The pox was the first modern disease,” Weisser writes, “but not for the reasons we like to think.” Her argument—that shame, not science, shaped how people experienced illness—feels startlingly contemporary.

Dunaway, an author and professor of English, speculates on how some artists’ styles evolved because of their sight. The haziness of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings, he writes, “probably resulted from cataracts. For Turner, visual limitation became visual transcendence.” Paul Cézanne, who was myopic, “disdained help from lenses: ‘Take those vulgar things away,’ he reportedly said.” Dunaway discusses his own near-sightedness and how it affected him growing up: “The fact that my sight was weak left me with the feeling that I was not right, or whole—a visual loser.” The author’s own experience has him wondering about the origins of glasses. He writes about Roger Bacon, the 13th-century Oxford scholar “imprisoned for inventing glasses (or trying to).” The “first published mention of spectacles,” he notes, dates to a Venetian document, from 1300, that refers to “discs for the eye.” Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing (1942), Dunaway tries living a week without them, keeping readers posted on his progress: “It oddly resembled a drug trip….colors pulsed madly; walls undulated.” Dunaway touches on various conditions, including myopia, noting that the number of people needing glasses keeps going up. He delves into the longtime stigma to wearing glasses. One of the lines he heard as a kid—“a personal favorite”—was, “You reading that book or smelling it?” He devotes a chapter to fashion and, writing about literature and film, argues that “glasses in films have historically indicated a character’s disability or inadequacy.” Dunaway eventually gets cataract surgery. “Awaiting renewed vision, I am deeply grateful,” he writes. “For the entire optical industry, and of course, for friends and family who put up with me endlessly saying, ‘Would you move that a little closer?’ ‘What does that say?’ or ‘I’m sorry; I can’t see that.’”

Most jazz aficionados may not have heard of Mura Dehn (1902-87), but she played a significant role in the genre’s development. A white woman, Dehn discovered jazz as a young girl studying classical dance in her native Russia. Her appreciation deepened when she moved to Paris in the 1920s to further her studies, hanging out with progressive artists such as Josephine Baker. Dehn eventually came to New York, where she was a regular at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, and “immersed herself in Black social dance.” As Vaccaro, professor emerita of dance at Rider University, puts it, Dehn “boldly wrote about it, beginning in the 1930s, when few others were paying attention.” Vaccaro has written this revelatory biography “to uncover what led a white, Russian, Jewish woman to an act of cultural preservation, and serves to credit, name and bring to the fore some of the artists who were the creators and originators of Black social dance during her lifetime.” She focuses on three main areas of Dehn’s career: the Academy of Swing, which Dehn co-founded in “an attempt to define the form and rhythm of jazz dance”; a film, The Spirit Moves, four volumes of footage shot between 1950 and 1984 that Vaccaro calls “one of the most important films made of the chronology of jazz dance in her time”; and Dehn’s Traditional Jazz Dance Company, the achievements of which included the show Rag to Rock and worldwide tours under the auspices of the State Department, including an eight-country tour of Africa. Vaccaro interviews figures who worked with Dehn, including Allen Blitz, who served as the dance company’s manager. And she does a good job of showcasing Dehn’s achievements, as well as the resistance she encountered from those who distrusted her because she was an outsider, a woman, and white.

In the 1980s, the Madrid slum of San Blas was at the heart of the heroin epidemic on the continent. It was an unlikely place for an American couple to raise their young children, but when God calls, you must answer—Christian missionaries Elliott and Mary Tepper packed up their boys and traveled from Mexico to Spain, eager to find a way to serve the Lord. At first, Elliott and Mary, along with their children, handed out religious tracts to “yonkis,” hoping to bring the Word to the addicts living on the streets of their neighborhood (“My father told us we had planted seeds in men’s hearts,” the author recalls). But the Teppers weren’t naive about the effectiveness of Bible verses alone to get people off drugs and see the light. Their apartment became an ad hoc detox center for those looking to kick their habits, and as word spread, the couple formally founded Betel, a free, donation-funded addiction clinic. It wasn’t long before the horrific specter of AIDS began to haunt the drug community, with most cases spread by intravenous infection. That only emboldened the Teppers to continue their care for the yonkis, regardless of their HIV status. As the author recounts, his unconventional childhood brought him into proximity with HIV positive addicts, who became his friends. The faith that powered the Teppers’ desire to do good wasn’t conditional or biased; that fulsome affection is felt throughout this memoir, even as the family’s beliefs were routinely tested. Not only did they see their nearest and dearest friends succumb one by one to AIDS—the Teppers were also shaken by unthinkable personal tragedies. These were faced with the same, clear-eyed fortitude that the Teppers brought to their mission.

Sports historian Taylor turns to golf with a biography of Ted Rhodes (1913-1969). Born into poverty in Nashville, he first encountered golf when he was 8, making his own club and balls and a rudimentary course in a park. He began caddying at a country club, learning to play from the caddy master. In 1941, Rhodes played in his first tournament, the Joe Louis Open—the popular boxer organized the event for Black golfers; Rhodes finished a remarkable third. Louis hired him as his traveling caddy. Later, the singer Billy Eckstine hired Rhodes as his golf tutor. After finishing fourth in an all-Black tournament in Ohio, Louis hired him back. He played in the Los Angeles Open but failed to make the cut. A series of wins led the Los Angeles Sentinel to declare, “Ted Rhodes is perhaps the greatest Negro golfer in the country and rates high with the Whites.” Taylor does a good job of chronicling the lengthy battle over racism in the game. When Rhodes qualified for the Phoenix Open in 1952, “for the first time, Black professional golfers would compete in a PGA event.” From 1946 to 1950, he won 28 times. Even with success, the money was always tight. An endorsement deal for clubs helped. The author’s in-depth research allows readers to experience his individual rounds and specific shots. With cameos by Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and other greats, including many fascinating unheralded Black players, Taylor provides a thorough portrait of the sport at this time. In 1961, in a unanimous vote, the PGA eliminated its “Caucasian-only” membership clause. Thanks largely to Rhodes, Taylor writes, “Hope for Black golfers was realized.”