I hope you’ll click through to my post at the Nerdy Book Club to see the cover for my new book, which is due out September 5th. I hope you like it!… Read More
I have a couple of vivid memories from my high school AP French literature class. Our teacher, Madame Sorrell, was a lovely woman whose bright red hair tumbled in tendrils to her shoulders, and who was all chiffon scarves and… Read More
In the course of my research for an upcoming book about poison in history (Spring, 2017), I came across a lot of cool facts that, for space reasons, I was unable to include in the book. One of these is… Read More
As a kid, I loved detective stories. My favorites were Agatha Christie (I can’t wait to read this new bookabout poisons in Agatha Christie stories). I also devoured Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Both Christie and Conan Doyle… Read More
As part of my research for an upcoming book, I’ve been reading old newspaper accounts of murderers, including an infamous poisoning case that happened in London, in 1910. Here are the quick details: Doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen (1862 – 1910)… Read More
I’m still deep in the midst of picture research for an upcoming book. In this blog post I wrote about the preponderance of pictures of physicians taking patients’ pulses, and in this blog post I posted a bunch of images… Read More
I’ve been thumbing through old magazines, looking for advertisements to possibly include in my upcoming book, and came across an ad in this issue of The American Magazine, from December, 1923:It’s an ad for LEAD PAINT on page 195.It’s too… Read More
In this book from 1868 called The Guide to General Information on Common Things, written by “A Lady,” I stumbled across this entry called “What is Asbestos?”
I think I’ll let the entry speak for itself.… Read More
A very long time ago, when I was taking my SATs, I encountered a short, four letter word in the analogy section that I didn’t know: bane. Reader, if you are under the age of 17 and still have SATs… Read More