A lucid, humane book that shows how fear, commerce, and desire made London both sick and modern.
A richly textured portrait of a city steeped in shame.
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.
A lucid, humane book that shows how fear, commerce, and desire made London both sick and modern.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781009651837
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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