Never quite jells into a coherent work, but its many individual parts are great fun to read.
An entertaining potpourri about poison: anecdotes, history, lore, science and trivia.
MacInnes (Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar, 2003), an Australian science writer, has fun with his deadly subject, giving the reader a glimpse of famous poisoners and their victims, a bit of the science of poisons and their detection, and a brief survey of the uses and abuses, intentional and accidental, of poisons. Opening with a dramatis personae that includes an assorted cast of characters from Cleopatra to Clare Booth Luce and a glossary of poisons that goes way beyond arsenic and strychnine, he wanders widely over the landscape of poison and poisoners. Studding his text is a plethora of paragraphs set off by shaded backgrounds that contain nonessential but intriguing sidelights, rather like overgrown footnotes that have moved up into the main body of the work. They can be skipped by the impatient reader, but shouldn’t be. MacInnes considers poisons in various guises and locations: in food and drink, in the medicine chest, in cosmetics, in household items, in the workplace and in the environment. Further, he looks at their place in politics, recounting victims from Socrates to Yushchenko, and at their use as a weapon of war—or of terrorism—from the sulfur used by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War to the sarin released in Tokyo’s subway system and the anthrax introduced into the U.S. postal system. Nature’s poisons, too, come under his scrutiny, with stories of venomous snakes, killer fish, poisonous insects and the tiniest poisoners, the microbes. MacInnes wraps up his tour by going deep inside the cell and pointing to the chemicals that induce apoptosis, the death of individual cells necessary to organ development in all creatures. Poison, it seems, is everywhere—in us and around us—and is even essential to life.
Never quite jells into a coherent work, but its many individual parts are great fun to read.Pub Date: May 12, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-761-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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