by Sam Kean ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 13, 2021
A mostly entertaining rogues’ gallery of scientists gone bad.
Thinking of submitting to experimental surgery? This book might give you pause.
“What makes mad scientists mad isn’t their lack of logic or reason or scientific acumen,” observes popular science writer Kean. “It’s that they do science too well, to the exclusion of their humanity.” Cleopatra, the Greco-Egyptian queen with whom the author begins his narrative, wasn’t exactly mad and wasn’t exactly a scientist, though she did experiment on prisoners and handmaids to discover which poisons were most efficacious and investigate when a fetus’s sex could be first determined in the womb. The story comes from Plutarch, who wasn’t a fan, so it may be suspect. Kean is on surer footing with his later, brightly told anecdotes of a host of scientists and para-scientists who merrily crossed the ethical line in the quest for glory and sometimes wealth. One was William Dampier, who had preternatural gifts for navigation and reading the weather and who gave us “the first meteorologically detailed account of a hurricane,” yet he funded his research through buccaneering. Kean then looks into modern “biopiracy,” which implicates the Asian trade in endangered animals for their supposed medical powers, and then the slave trade, with which early scientific research in Africa was thoroughly implicated. The surgery of the title comes with the invention and immediate abuse of the lobotomy, but before we get to that rather gruesome subject, we spend time in the hands of medical murderers, body snatchers, and merchants in the cadaver trade—which is beset by constant shortages that inspire “digging up buried bodies again or swiping them from funeral pyres and selling them on the ‘red market.’ ” Unabomber Ted Kaczynski makes an appearance, having been broken by a sadistic psychological experiment while at Harvard, as does Annie Dookhan, the felonious forensic scientist whose inventions led Massachusetts to overturn more than 21,500 convictions, “the largest such action in U.S. history.”
A mostly entertaining rogues’ gallery of scientists gone bad.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-49650-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2021
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by Sam Kean ; adapted by Adrian Dingle & Kelsey Kennedy
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Truman Capote ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 1965
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
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