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
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
