Book cover of The Topography of Wellness: How Health and Disease Shaped the American Landscape

Book description

The COVID-19 pandemic has re-ignited discussions of how architects, landscapes, and urban planners can shape the environment in response to disease. This challenge is both a timely topic and one with an illuminating history. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr offers a chronological narrative of how six epidemics…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked The Topography of Wellness as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

For several years, I’ve been teaching a course called the American Way of Death, and Sara Jensen Carr’s The Topography of Wellness features prominently on my syllabus.

Carr explores how soaring mortality rates in the nineteenth century, mostly from diseases like cholera and tuberculosis, prompted an army of public health reformers, urban planners, and municipal leaders to tackle the toxic urban landscape by envisioning and creating a new landscape with the kinds of infrastructure that today we take for granted. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the new and improved city, with its public water and sewer systems and…

If you love The Topography of Wellness...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancĆ©, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

Want books like The Topography of Wellness?

Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like The Topography of Wellness.

Browse books like The Topography of Wellness

Book cover of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America
Book cover of From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store
Book cover of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

Share your top 3 reads of 2025!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,366

readers submitted
so far, will you?

šŸ“š If you like The Topography of Wellness, you might also like...

Book cover of Deadly Revenge

Deadly Revenge by Patricia Bradley,

Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…

Book cover of The Duty of Memory

The Duty of Memory by Vicki Olsen,

Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.

This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…

5 book lists we think you will like!