The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most FoulEleanor HermanBook club “…people living in terror of poison were, in fact, poisoning themselves every day of their lives, through their medicine, cosmetics, and living conditions. At Europe’s dazzling royal courts, beneath a facade of bejeweled beauty, there festered illness, ignorance,…
Tag: Popular Science
What I read: March 2025
The Theft of the Iron Dogs: A Lancashire MysteryE.C.R. Lorac “The harvest moon was just past the full, and it seemed to sail overhead in a sea of luminous iridescence, due to the vaporous clouds in the high steely vault of the sky.” While checking on their riverside cottage at the end of the harvest…
What I read: February 2025
7 Rules of Power: Surprising—But True—Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your CareerJeffrey PfefferDNF “Most fundamentally, power is a tool. Like many or maybe most tools, power, once mastered, can be used to accomplish great things, horrendously terrible things, and everything in between. The point: Don’t confuse or conflate your reactions to…
What I read: November 2024
ADHD is Awesome: A Guide to (Mostly) Thriving with ADHDPenn Holderness with Kim Holderness “Dr. Hallowell describes people with ADHD as having a Ferrari engine in a race car brain with bicycle brakes.” YouTube creator Penn Holderness was diagnosed with ADHD in college. Now he and his wife Kim have written ADHD is Awesome to…
What I read: August 2024
The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. rex and How It Shook Our WorldDavid R. Randall “The T. rex, the king of our prehistoric world, played an outsized role in the making of the modern one…Rather than a mirror into the past, the creature proved to reflect the concerns of the present.” With the discovery…