On October 30th treat yourself to Deborah Blum’s talk about two of her fascinating books, The Poisoners Handbook and Ghost Hunters. Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science journalist, the best-selling author of six books, and a writer with a long-standing interest in poison, in our everyday lives, in our history and in far too many murders.
Blum, who has a significant history in writing about science, was named director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015, where she launched the award-winning science magazine, Undark. The name of the magazine comes from the 1920s brand name for radium-based luminous paint; she has described the publication as one that will seek to illuminate science and its complex, human story in both light and shadow.
To learn more about Blum's illustrious background, click here.
Told poison by poison, The Poisoner's Handbook, a New York Times best-seller, follows the pioneering work of two unsung heroes of Jazz-Age New York, a pair of New York City scientists fighting to catch killers, identify toxic compounds, and create the science of forensic detection. Named by Crime Reads as one of the top ten true crime reads of the last decade, the book was also an Emmy-nominated PBS documentary in 2014.
“Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook is an incredibly thorough and endlessly fascinating account of one of the most important public health-and-safety developments in history: forensic toxicology, which was pioneered from 1915 to 1936, principally in New York City.
--Crime Reads, November 2019, The Ten Best Books of the Last Decade
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Poision Squad and The Poisoner's Handbook tells the amazing story of William James's quest for empirical evidence of the spirit world
What if a world-renowned philosopher and professor of psychiatry at Harvard suddenly announced he believed in ghosts? At the close of the nineteenth century, the illustrious William James led a determined scientific investigation into "unexplainable" incidences of clairvoyance and ghostly visitations. James and a small group of eminent scientists staked their reputations, their careers, even their sanity on one of the most extraordinary quests ever undertaken: to empirically prove the existence of ghosts, spirits, and psychic phenomena. What they pursued—and what they found—raises questions as fascinating today as they were then.
This acclaimed and provocative book asks the reader a simple question: what if it’s real? “After reading Blum’s mesmerizing account,” declared Entertainment Weekly, “you might be tempted to dust off that Ouija board.” Fascinating . . . Blum tells her literally wondrous tale very well.
--The New York Times Book Review)
A fascinating reminder that reason and revelation are not opposites.
--James Shreve, author of The Genome War
When: 10/30 at 7pm, refreshments + book signings at 8pm
Where: Union Church Connection Room
485 Columbus Ave
Books for sale by Parkside Books
Come in person or attend virtually via Zoom
TO CONNECT VIA ZOOM:
Email info@friendsofsouthendlibrary.org and you will receive the ZOOM info.
FOSEL subscribers will receive the ZOOM link in our Mailchimp newsletter just before the event.