Provides a highly informative, if occasionally technical, look at the world of harmful substances.
Debut author George presents an in-depth book on poisons.
Just about any substance can be deleterious when taken in large enough amounts—caffeine pills or even water. The book’s focus, however, is on more familiar types of poisoning and overdosing. Topics include common deadly plants, recreational drugs, and many types of intentional poisonings, whether the intent is homicidal or suicidal. Technical terms occur throughout, including symptoms of many poisonings, like tachycardia (i.e. “fast heartbeat”), but the text is still highly readable for the layperson. Each chapter includes case studies that illustrate a person or people becoming very ill and often dying due to something they ingested— knowingly or not. Such studies tend to stick to the basics—the substance, when the situation occurred, and legal repercussions, if any, for the parties involved. While details can be scant, those included are often riveting. A number of examples of accidental consumption involve an unlabeled or incorrectly labeled poisonous substance, like the seemingly innocuous yet highly lethal ethylene glycol, a sweet tasting, common ingredient in antifreeze. A chapter on plants drives home the point that even big, beautiful flowers like the Angel’s Trumpet (Brugmansia suaveolens) can be deadly when consumed. A section on “Multiple Victim Poisonings” details how easy it can be to poison many people at once, whether the intent is as harmless as a dish at a company picnic or as sinister as a cult suicide or even a targeted attack. George deploys the requisite dark humor; on the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult: “There is no evidence to indicate whether or not the cult members were successful in targeting their souls to a higher level in the universe.” In contrast to the real-life examples, the book can wax somewhat obvious; for example, “The properties of the specific poison dictate the method of administration.” Surely even the most heedless poisoner would not try to administer an undissolved solid poison in a liquid. Nevertheless, as the case studies show, simply because someone makes use of a poison does not necessarily mean they understand the poison’s properties. Then there are those who know the hazards of a poison and yet will go to great lengths to consume it. The text is rife with troubling practices like opioid addicts’ brewing a “tea” from fentanyl patches. For those who have given little thought to the many noxious substances around them, the book serves as an eye opener. Even compounds the reader has likely heard of can be found in unexpected places. It turns out nicotine is a naturally occurring component in a number of plants (including eggplant, though of course there’s much more nicotine in tobacco), and it’s not unheard of for helium to be utilized in suicides. By the book’s end, it seems that even the most reckless reader would approach the many ingestible hazards of the world with fresh apprehension.
Provides a highly informative, if occasionally technical, look at the world of harmful substances.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4987-0382-6
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Auerbach Publications
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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