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The Poisoner's Handbook
- Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
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Editorial reviews
The Poisoner’s Handbook is a masterful addition to that fascinating and seemingly inexhaustible genre of books that uses an apparently obtuse subject as a vehicle to explore wider themes, a genre which includes Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief.and Robert Sullivan’s excellent Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. In all three books, a historical or cultural quirk is a prism that refracts big and disparate issues of the time: The Poisoner’s Handbook is the history of early 20th-century crime and punishment, labor law and health care, Tammany Hall and prohibition, and traces changing attitudes to morality and mental illness, xenophobia and racism, police reform and politics.
It is also, of course, a darkly entertaining dissection of the sordid and inventive ways that people found to off each other in Jazz-age New York, and the attendant rise of forensic medicine. Heroes like Charles Norris and Thomas Gonzalez, forensic pioneers, rub shoulders with Mary Fanny Crayton, “America’s Lucrezia Borgia”, and a comedy duo of prohibition cops. There are plenty of grim passages the physical effects of poisons are described in harrowing detail. But there is also black comedy an early poison victim is a patient at a retirement home, killed after ringing the bell for attention one time too many.
There is enough material here to fill several books, not to mention offering a juicy role for a narrator to relish. As if taking her cue from the many CSI comparisons already garnered by the book, Coleen Marlo has taken a clinical approach to the dense material, holding the gory details at a distance. Her calm, forensic voice is an apt guide to escort us through the underbelly of murder and its attendant squeamish details, although some modulation in tone and delivery would be welcome. But her voice is an acceptable canvas for the rich writing. Blum knows exactly which nuggets to extract from the mass of research at her disposal in order to bring the past to life: the two elderly people who’d spent a lifetime alone, finally happy to find companionship together before being murdered one year into their marriage. She also has a nice line in dry understatement: “On July 31, Lillian ordered a tongue sandwich, a coffee, and a slice of huckleberry pie,” she reports. “It was the pie that killed her.” Meanwhile arsenic, known as “the inheritance powder” because of its wild popularity in domestic murder cases, has “usefully murderous properties”. Marlo presents these cases dispassionately, letting the incredible facts speak for themselves, and so makes their impact even more striking. Dafydd Phillips
Publisher's summary
Deborah Blum, writing with the high style and skill for suspense that is characteristic of the very best mystery fiction, shares the untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City.
In The Poisoner's Handbook, Blum draws from highly original research to track the fascinating, perilous days when a pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime.
Drama unfolds case by case as the heroes of The Poisoner's Handbook---chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler---investigate a family mysteriously stricken bald, Barnum and Bailey's Famous Blue Man, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner serving poisoned pies, and many others. Each case presents a deadly new puzzle, and Norris and Gettler work with a creativity that rivals that of the most imaginative murderer, creating revolutionary experiments to tease out even the wiliest compounds from human tissue. Yet in the tricky game of toxins, even science can't always be trusted, as proven when one of Gettler's experiments erroneously sets free a suburban housewife later nicknamed "America's Lucretia Borgia" to continue her nefarious work.
From the vantage of Norris and Gettler's laboratory in the infamous Bellevue Hospital it becomes clear that killers aren't the only toxic threat to New Yorkers. Modern life has created a kind of poison playground, and danger lurks around every corner. Automobiles choke the city streets with carbon monoxide, while potent compounds such as morphine can be found on store shelves in products ranging from pesticides to cosmetics. Prohibition incites a chemist's war between bootleggers and government chemists, while in Gotham's crowded speakeasies each round of cocktails becomes a game of Russian roulette. Norris and Gettler triumph over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice.
Critic reviews
- Audie Award Nominee - Best Nonfiction Audiobook, 2011
"Blum effectively balances the fast-moving detective story with a clear view of the scientific advances that her protagonists brought to the field. Caviar for true-crime fans and science buffs alike." (<>Kirkus)
"With the pacing and rich characterization of a first-rate suspense novelist, Blum makes science accessible and fascinating." (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review)
"Blum interlaces true-crime stories with the history of forensic medicine and the chemistry of various poisons…. [A] readable and enjoyable book.... Highly recommended." (Library Journal)
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Story
G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.
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Loved every minute
- By Brian on 02-05-08
By: G. Wayne Miller
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Death in the Air
- The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut, Death in the Air, is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. In winter 1952, London automobiles and thousands of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air. But the smog that descended on December fifth of 1952 was different; it was a type that held the city hostage for five long days.
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Interesting
- By irene on 11-27-17
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The Demon Under The Microscope
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. This incredible discovery was sulfa, the first antibiotic medication. In The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history of the drug that shaped modern medicine.
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Great Book!!!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 05-21-08
By: Thomas Hager
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Poisons
- From Hemlock to Botox and the Killer Bean Calabar
- By: Peter Macinnis
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A wide-ranging and provocative look - teeming with little-known facts and engaging stories - at a subject of the direst interest. Poisons permeate our world. They are in the environment, the workplace, the home. They are in food, our favorite whiskey, medicine, well water. They have been used to cure disease as well as incapacitate and kill. They smooth wrinkles, block pain, stimulate, and enhance athletic ability. In this entertaining and fact-filled audiobook, science writer Peter Macinnis considers poisons in all their aspects. He recounts stories of the celebrated poisoners in history and literature....
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#MyNonFictionAddiction
- By EinsteinzVice on 11-07-19
By: Peter Macinnis
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Charlatan
- America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him and the Age of Flimflam
- By: Pope Brock
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This is the enormously entertaining story of how a fraudulent surgeon made a fortune by inserting goats' testes into impotent American men. "Doctor" John Brinkley became a world renowned authority on sexual rejuvenation in the 1920s, with famous politicians and even royalty asking for his services.
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nix the narrator
- By susan nenadic on 02-08-09
By: Pope Brock
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Old Sparky
- The Electric Chair and the History of the Death Penalty
- By: Anthony Galvin
- Narrated by: Jack Reynolds
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Old Sparky covers the history of capital punishment in America and the "current wars" between Edison and Westinghouse, which led to the development of the electric chair. It examines how the electric chair became the most popular method of execution in America before being superseded by lethal injection. Famous executions are explored alongside quirky last meals and poignant last words.
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Information not a sermon.
- By Jakk on 10-24-16
By: Anthony Galvin
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Unnatural Causes
- By: Dr Richard Shepherd
- Narrated by: Dr Richard Shepherd
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As the country's top forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd has spent a lifetime uncovering the secrets of the dead. When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right - and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die?
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Boring!
- By Zoesmydog on 06-21-19
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Morgue
- A Life in Death
- By: Vincent Di Maio, Ron Franscell
- Narrated by: Tony Ward
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Vincent Di Maio, MD, son of a famous New York City medical examiner, is one of the lions of forensic science. In this clear, gritty, and enthralling narrative, Di Maio himself guides us into the inner sanctum, through the cases that have made him famous, from the exhumation of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the racially charged shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin to the unmasking of a serial baby killer and the mysterious death of troubled genius Vincent van Gogh.
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Biased book with little actual forensics.
- By Lila Fowler on 08-02-16
By: Vincent Di Maio, and others
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Incendiary
- The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling
- By: Michael Cannell
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Long before the specter of terrorism haunted the public imagination, a serial bomber stalked the streets of 1950s New York. The race to catch him would give birth to a new science called criminal profiling. Grand Central, Penn Station, Radio City Music Hall - for almost two decades, no place was safe from the man who signed his anonymous letters "FP" and left his lethal devices in phone booths, storage lockers, even tucked into the plush seats of movie theaters.
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16 Years NYC Held Hostage
- By in1ear (John Row) on 04-27-17
By: Michael Cannell
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Murder, Misadventure and Miserable Ends
- Tales from a Colonial Coroner's Court
- By: Dr. Catie Gilchrist
- Narrated by: Emma Grant Williams
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Most of us today rarely see a dead body. In 19th-century Sydney, when health was precarious and workplaces and the busy city streets were often dangerous, witnessing a death was rather common. And any death that was sudden or suspicious would be investigated by the coroner. Henry Shiell was the Sydney city coroner from 1866 to 1889. In the course of his unusually long career, he delved into the lives, loves, crimes, homes, and workplaces of colonial Sydneysiders.
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very interesting and enlightening
- By Barbara J Allison on 08-29-19
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Butcher's Work
- True Crime Tales of American Murder and Madness
- By: Harold Schechter
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age “Bluebeard” who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country. A decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America.
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Love this Author!!!
- By jofi00 on 11-14-22
By: Harold Schechter
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Killers of the Flower Moon
- The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
- By: David Grann
- Narrated by: Will Patton, Ann Marie Lee, Danny Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
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An outstanding story, highly recommended
- By S. Blakely on 06-22-17
By: David Grann
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Last Dance, Last Chance
- And Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files, Book 8)
- By: Ann Rule
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ann Rule presents her 8th collection of crime stories drawn from her private files - and featuring the riveting case of a fraudulent doctor whose lifelong deceptions had deadly consequences. Dr. Anthony Pignataro was a cosmetic surgeon and a famed medical researcher whose flashy red Lamborghini and flamboyant lifestyle in western New York State suggested a highly successful career. But no one was safe if they got in his way. With scalpel, drugs, and arsenic, he betrayed every oath a physician makes - until his own schemes backfired.
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Enjoyed the stories
- By Grace on 05-13-14
By: Ann Rule
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Death in the City of Light
- The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris
- By: David King
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Death in the City of Light is the gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris. As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld. The main suspect was Dr. Marcel Petiot, a handsome, charming physician with remarkable charisma.
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Too many facts too little story
- By Caitanya on 09-27-11
By: David King
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Damnation Island
- Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York
- By: Stacy Horn
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Today it is known as Roosevelt Island. In 1828, when New York City purchased this narrow, two-mile-long island in the East River, it was called Blackwell's Island. There, over the next hundred years, the city would build a lunatic asylum, prison, hospital, workhouse, and almshouse. Stacy Horn has crafted a compelling and chilling narrative told through the stories of the poor souls sent to Blackwell's, as well as the period's city officials, reformers, and journalists (including the famous Nellie Bly). Damnation Island re-creates what daily life was like on the island....
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Fascinating!
- By tamborine on 08-06-18
By: Stacy Horn
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Hell's Princess
- The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men
- By: Harold Schechter
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908, she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her Indiana “murder farm". Some were hired hands. Others were well-to-do bachelors. All of them vanished without a trace.
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Can a book about a serial killer be entertaining?
- By Lori Hanson on 05-08-18
By: Harold Schechter
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The Royal Art of Poison
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The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family's spoons, tried on their underpants, and tested their chamber pots. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions.
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Relieved and surprised
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The Disappearing Spoon
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I Need the Gene for Audiobook Selection
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The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth
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Boring Toilet Humor
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The Icepick Surgeon
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Science is a force for good in the world—at least usually. But sometimes, when obsession gets the better of scientists, they twist a noble pursuit into something sinister. Under this spell, knowledge isn’t everything, it’s the only thing—no matter the cost. Bestselling author Sam Kean tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process.
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FANTASTIC! & What’s up with all these naysayers (negative reviewers)?!
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Elemental
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In 2016, with the addition of four final elements - nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson - to make a total of 118 elements, the periodic table was finally complete, rendering any pre-existing books on the subject obsolete. Tim James, the secondary-school science teacher we all wish we'd had, provides an accessible and wonderfully entertaining 'biography of chemistry' that uses stories to explain the positions and patterns of elements in the periodic table. Many popular science titles tend to tell the history of scientific developments, leaving the actual science largely unexplained; James, however, makes use of stories to explain the principles of chemistry within the table, showing its relevance to everyday life.
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In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection. At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.
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Tragic Murder at dawn of detective bureau
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The dead talk - to the right listener. They can tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died, and, of course, who killed them. Forensic scientists can unlock the mysteries of the past and help serve justice using the messages left by a corpse, a crime scene, or the faintest of human traces.
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Crime Seen
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The Ghost Map
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It was okay until the end
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Bellevue
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David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 12-14-16
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Unnatural Causes
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As the country's top forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd has spent a lifetime uncovering the secrets of the dead. When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right - and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die?
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Boring!
- By Zoesmydog on 06-21-19
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The Radium Girls
- The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women
- By: Kate Moore
- Narrated by: Angela Brazil
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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The year was 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous - the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses.
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A simple way to improve the robotic narration
- By B. C. French on 06-07-17
By: Kate Moore
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All That Remains
- A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes
- By: Sue Black
- Narrated by: Angela Dawe
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Dame Sue Black is an internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist. She has lived her life eye to eye with the Grim Reaper, and she writes vividly about it in this book, which is part primer on the basics of identifying human remains, part frank memoir of a woman whose first paying job as a schoolgirl was to apprentice in a butcher shop, and part no-nonsense but deeply humane introduction to the reality of death in our lives. It is a treat for CSI junkies, murder mystery and thriller fans, and anyone seeking a clear-eyed guide to a subject that touches us all.
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I wanted a science book about forensics. I got a mostly-memoir instead.
- By A Customer on 11-29-19
By: Sue Black
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Quackery
- A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything
- By: Lydia Kang, Nate Pedersen
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
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What won't we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnine - yes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poison - was dosed like Viagra. Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices.
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Computer-generated Narrator. Dated Humour.
- By Nemo on 12-28-18
By: Lydia Kang, and others
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Gory Details
- By: Erika Engelhaupt
- Narrated by: Mari Weiss
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Filled to the brim with far-out facts, this wickedly informative narrative from the author of National Geographic's popular Gory Details blog takes us on a fascinating journey through an astonishing new reality. Blending humor and journalism in the tradition of Mary Roach, acclaimed science reporter Erika Engelhaupt investigates the gross, strange, and morbid absurdities of our bodies and our universe.
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Feels like old school Discovery channel
- By Anonymous User on 02-15-23
By: Erika Engelhaupt
What listeners say about The Poisoner's Handbook
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Reagan Kelly
- 03-02-10
Fascinating book marred by production errors
First, this book is fascinating and engrossing, neatly following the birth of the New York City Medical Examiner's office and the creation of forensic medicine as a science in America. The book is organized into chapters covering both a short span of time (usually a year or two) and a particular poison that figures prominently into cases from that time.
The audio production itself, however, suffers from frequent mispronunciations of words and occasional changes of meaning from inopportune pauses by the narrator. It's as though the narrator did the book in a single take and no one bothered to listen to it with an appropriately critical ear. If it weren't for this the book would rate five stars from me.
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86 people found this helpful
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- Meaghan
- 04-22-10
Interesting content, distracting reader
I was interested in this book because of an interview with the author on the Scientific American podcast. I really enjoyed the way she spun history and chemistry into a very interesting narrative. The way things were in the big cities of America during that time are often a dark history that we don't learn about in high school history class. It is shocking but terribly interesting.
The book itself was great, but I was a little distracted by the woman reading it. I wish it had been the author, since I know from her interview she has a decent speaking voice and is knowledgeable on the content. The woman who read the book on the other hand would pronounce the more scientific words awkwardly at times. She also did these really silly character voices. The main character was supposed to be this really educated guy, and she made him sound like a Brooklyn dockhand. Maybe I missed the part where he had a more modest upbringing, but it was comical, and I found it very distracting.
Other than that EXCELLENT book.
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52 people found this helpful
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- Aaron - Audible
- 10-12-11
CSI eat your heart out
For a person who has similar (morbid) tastes, "The Poisoner's Handbook" perfectly fits the bill. These crimes take place in New York City during the Jazz Age. The author carefully describes various poisons, such as wood alcohol, arsenic, and radium and the various effects it had on the victims. If your knowledge of poisons is based on tv shows or movies, you will be surprised to find out a lot you (probably) didn't know already.
As you can guess, forensic science was in its infancy at the time. This book focuses on Charles Norris, the New York City coroner, Alexander Gettler, Mr Norris' lead chemist and Harrison Martland, the New Jersey coroner. These people are for real, not like the old "Ouincy, ME" television show of long ago.
When you see old movies of people drinking "bathtub gin" during Prohibition, it looks so carefree and fun. But it wasn't. Many deaths were caused by the "hooch" that was made from renatured industrial alcohol. It wasn't a pretty death, either. It makes me wonder why anyone would be willing to take the risk of drinking homemade booze, but plenty of people did it, I guess thinking "It won't happen to me".
When you see what types of ingredients were in the common ordinary household items, you will wonder how anybody managed to stay alive in that type period. You think toxic products are bad now, when you read this book, you will be surprised how far (or maybe not) we have come.
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46 people found this helpful
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- RKNS
- 05-25-10
Interesting book; marginal reader
Fascinating information on poisons; scary incites into our history and culture in the context of corporate irresponsibility and government hesitation to act. The reader damaged the experience with overwrought attempts at foreign accents and obvious mispronunciations of scientific terms. I really wish there were technically savvy proof-listeners for audio as there are proof readers for the written word.
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32 people found this helpful
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- The Louligan
- 03-06-12
WOW!!!
I can be a bit verbose with my reviews but I write what I want to see when I read the reviews of others. However the three-letter heading really sums it up! But, if you insist.....
While I know that forensics didn't begin recently, there has been a huge gap on books about criminal investigation in the decades between Victorian-era Sherlock Holmes and present day "CSI: Miami". And both of these accounts are largely science fiction - my long-time Sr. Crime Scene Investigator boyfriend doesn't drive a Hummer, conduct highly technical forensic and chemical tests, arrest perps, or interrogate suspects! He mainly "bags it 'n' tags it", i.e., collects evidence like bullet casings, weapons, blood, drugs, etc., dusts for fingerprints, and thoroughly documents the crime scene with schematics, photos, and video, assuring that everything is logged in which begins the critical chain of custody for trial.
This book gives credit to 2 brilliant dedicated scientists who created, formally organized, and set the current standard for catching murderers and/or exonerating innocent people of the most elusive and complicated manner of death - poisoning. Before there were mass chromatograph spectrometers, there was chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler, scientists who dedicated their time and, often, their own money to convince the corrupt NYC legal system that forensics had a much- needed place in criminal investigation. And they did it with glass tubes, petri dishes, and Bunsen burners in the 1920s! They could keep working in a blackout while today's forensic labs would have to close up until the computers had power!
My only complaint is the narrator. While she can spit out long hard-to-pronounce chemical names without batting an eye, for some strange reason she had Dr. Gettler sounding like Tony Soprano! Totally unnecessary and often distracting. This is not a book which requires gimmicky accents. The subject matter stands on its own. AMAZING!!
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29 people found this helpful
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- rachel
- 07-19-10
Enjoyable Enough
This audiobook was good if you like to hear about the development of science and interaction of scientific advances with history, politics and society and crime.
The narrator was fine, though I disliked the voices she used when quoting some characters--they seemed like rude caricatures.
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27 people found this helpful
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- Pam
- 04-02-10
The Poisoner's Handbook
This book is excellent. The name is unfortunate because people who should read this and would find it excellent (most people) will pass it up because of the title. if you have an interest in medicine, how the medical communities work and how poor government affect every person, you should read this book.
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22 people found this helpful
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- Shawn
- 07-24-10
one more A+ for the book C- for the narrator
The book itself really made this time and place come to life for me. Detailed and informative for sure. The narration however left much to be desired. The character voices in particular seem so out of place to me as to really inhibit the enjoyment of, and my focus on the material. Coleen Marlo must desist from the character voices in all future endeavors.
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21 people found this helpful
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- Cynthia
- 03-23-13
The Poisoned Past
First of all, kudos to Deborah Blum and her publishers for picking Coleen Marlo to narrate this book. Marlo is fantastic narrating Amy Stewart’s “Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon’s Army and Other Diabolical Insects” and “The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks,” pronouncing complex scientific names and using foreign pronunciations easily (well, at least in the five languages I know well enough to know if she’s saying the words correctly.)
Blum’s “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York”. Rather than focusing solely on a particular crime or group of particular poisoners, Blum’s chapters are (in order): Chloroform; Wood Alcohol; Cyanides; Arsenic; Mercury; Carbon Monoxide Part I; Methyl Alcohol; Radium; Ethyl Alcohol; Carbon Monoxide Part II; and Thallium.
“The Poisoner’s Handbook” describes how the poisons were developed and used, and how the forensic science developed techniques to uncover the poisons. Blum weaves the tales of the scientists who worked so hard to make sure that cruel, careful murders by poisoners were detected. She also discusses a plethora of unintentional poisonings, and the public health risks that caused them.
The biggest cause of accidental poisonings was, in Jazz Age New York, prohibition. Blum describes New York City in the early 20th century so completely, I can see it in my mind, with horses and buggies, Model-T Fords, and a scrum of long-vanished air pollution.
"The Poisoner's Handbook" is lively and intriguing, and well worth the listen.
[If you found this review helpful, please let me know by pressing the helpful button. Thanks!]
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19 people found this helpful
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- EEB
- 03-17-10
Interesting book, horrible narration
I am currently about 3/4 of the way through this book. The story itself if fascinating. However, for a reader with a scientific bent, it is a little lite. But I am really struggling with the narration. As bad as any I have heard in my experience with audible books. It's a real job to listen to this narrator. I guess it speaks well for the book, itself, that I am determined to finish it.
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17 people found this helpful