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POISON

Name: POISON
Author: Gail Bell
ISBN: 0-312-30679-2

A HISTORY AND A FAMILY MEMOIR

by Gail Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2002

Messy, morbid, and entertaining.

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An Australian pharmacist debuts with a lively, if disorganized, story of poisonous death in her family framed within an informal history of toxic substances.

In 1980, the author's great-aunt confirmed the family legend that Bell's grandfather had poisoned two of his sons in 1927. A doctor of naturopathy and an herbalist working around Sydney, William Macbeth allegedly killed his retarded four-year-old son because the boy was expensive to support and then forced his three-year-old son to drink a strychnine tonic as punishment for trespassing in his dispensary. Bell’s research reveals that Macbeth had learned pharmacology as a drugstore clerk but claimed an impressive and uncheckable pedigree including study in Pennsylvania. His bestselling product, labeled Macbeth's Strengthening Tonic (supposedly tested in the Highlands of Scotland on descendants of the great warriors of Culloden), contained a low dosage of strychnine. While gathering information on her crooked family tree, Bell offers a beginner’s course on fatal drugs: strychnine comes from the seeds of the Koochla tree and acts as a paralytic; arsenic is a tissue poison, causing the heart, liver, and kidneys to stop functioning. The author also ventures into famous historical and literary deaths. Cleopatra, who tested snakebites on servants, probably chose a cobra over an asp because the death is easier and the corpse better-looking. Emma Bovary and Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning, and Bell describes Emma's probable treatment if she had arrived in a modern ER. She considers George Orwell's 1946 essay “Decline of the English Murder,” which laments the end of poisoning’s golden era, dated by Orwell from 1850 to1925, before the advent of toxicological testing and the preservation of stomach contents. Bell relishes unusual cases like Anne McConkey's poisoning of her husband with wolfsbane in 1841 and a pharmacist/lover’s attempt to seduce a colleague with Spanish Fly, which killed her and another co-worker.

Messy, morbid, and entertaining.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2002

ISBN: 0-312-30679-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002

Categories:

HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974

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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
PERIL
by Bob Woodward & Robert Costa

- BOOK REVIEW
RAGE
by Bob Woodward

- BOOK REVIEW
FEAR
by Bob Woodward

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THE RIGHT STUFF

by Tom Wolfe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1979

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Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.

But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.

But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.