Music

Kelley, Robin D.G. Thelonious Monk: the life and times of an American original. New York: Free Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Milner, Greg. Perfecting sound forever: an aural history of recorded music. New York: Faber and Faber, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Garrett, Charles Hiroshi. Struggling to define a nation: American music and the twentieth century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. (Publisher’s description)

Law

Byers, Michael. Who owns the Arctic?: understanding sovereignty disputes in the north. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

Benedict, Jeff. Little pink house: a true story of defiance and courage. New York: Grand Central Pub, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Bagenstos, Samuel R. Law and the contradictions of the disability rights movement. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Women’s studies

Dobbin, Frank. Inventing equal opportunity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Barndt, Deborah. Tangled routes: women, work, and globalization on the tomato trail. (2^nd ed.) Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. (Publisher’s description)

Ensler, Eve. I am an emotional creature: the secret life of girls around the world. New York: Villard, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

Collins, Gail. When everything changed: the amazing journey of American women, from 1960 to the present. New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Review: The poisoner’s handbook

Blum, Deborah. The poisoner’s handbook: murder and the birth of forensic medicine in Jazz Age New York. New York : Penguin Press, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

I usually shy away from true crime books, simply because I feel like I’m rubber-necking at a car accident when I read them.  While Deborah Blum’s book is filled with true crime stories, it is also filled with science and history, so I felt less troubled by the crime stories than I would in reading a serial killer exposé.  Additionally, it was a real page-turner, written with the edge-of-your-seat, I-am-going-to-stay-up-way-too-late-reading-this-book kind of prose.

Blum’s tale is that of the rise of forensic medicine, particularly under the direction of Dr. Charles Norris, who became the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City in 1918, and his toxicologist, Dr. Alexander Gettler.  To tell their stories, she tells stories of the major poisons of the day, and how forensic medicine and toxicology were used to detect poisons.  With chapters on chloroform, wood alcohol, cyanides, arsenic, mercury, carbon monoxide, methyl alcohol, radium, ethyl alcohol, and thallium, she takes the reader on a tour of the crimes committed and the scientific advances made in detecting those poisons.  (While it’s called a ‘handbook’, you don’t have to keep an eagle eye on your coffee cup while you’re reading; no one can add one of these poisons to your mug and ‘get away with murder’.)

The book certainly is gory.  There are descriptions of autopsies and damaged organs, violent deaths, and experiments on animals done by our hero scientists.  However, I do not think Blum saturated the text with gore in a way that many contemporary crime novelists do.  If she provides a detail about a poisoning death, it is relevant to the medical understanding of death by poisoning.  However, the story is not for the faint of stomach.  (If you watch forensic science television shows, you’ll find Blum’s descriptions to be pretty standard fare.)

One of the more interesting lessons I learned from the book was the way that Prohibition was perceived by the public, the government, and the chief medical examiner.  I had not been aware of the methods used by the government in denaturing industrial alcohol, nor in adding poisons to it, so that it could not be distilled for drinking.  Dr. Norris was an outspoken critic of this practice, since his office saw the results: more people died each year of methyl alcohol poisoning or from drinking poorly distilled illegal liquor than had died from alcohol-related deaths in the years before Prohibition.  Thus, to Norris, the government was morally responsible for killing its citizens, even if it was not legally responsible.  This certainly changed my (admittedly superficial) idea that Prohibition was discontinued merely because the temperance unions lost their influence, or because of the rise in crime related to bootlegging.  Norris’s outrage over the poisoning of drinkers seems justified; no crime should carry an immediate death sentence.

Overall, I though Blum’s book was a great read, and it was informative.  It stirred an interest in reading more about the era and in reading more by Blum. I highly recommend it.

Native American histories and literature

Obermeyer, Brice. Delaware tribe in a Cherokee nation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Hinderaker, Eric. The two Hendricks: unraveling a Mohawk mystery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

Levy, Buddy. Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the last stand of the Aztecs. New York: Bantam Books, 2008. (Publisher’s description)

Mielke, Laura L. Moving encounters: sympathy and the Indian question in Antebellum literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. (Publisher’s description)

Technology and computing

Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gemmell. Total recall: how the E-memory revolution will change everything. New York: Dutton, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Schell, Jesse. The art of game design: a book of lenses. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. (Publisher’s description)

Everett, Anna. Digital diaspora: a race for cyberspace. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Guins, Raiford. Edited clean version: technology and the culture of control. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Economics and business

Adler, Moshe. Economics for the rest of us: debunking the science that makes life dismal. New York: New Press, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

Staib, Robert, ed. Business management and environmental stewardship: environmental thinking as a prelude to management action. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Buigues, Pierre-André and Khalid Sekkat. Industrial policy in Europe, Japan and the USA: amounts, mechanisms and effectiveness. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Clikeman, Paul M. Called to account: fourteen financial frauds that shaped the American accounting profession. New York: Routledge, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

African-American history

Lentz-Smith, Adriane. Freedom struggles: African Americans and World War I. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Washington, Margaret. Sojourner Truth’s America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Manegold, C. S. Ten Hills Farm: the forgotten history of slavery in the North. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

Jones, Patrick D. The Selma of the North: civil rights insurgency in Milwaukee. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Religion

Wellman, James K., Jr., ed. Belief and bloodshed: religion and violence across time and tradition. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. (Publisher’s description)

Steffen, Lloyd. Holy war, just war: exploring the moral meaning of religious violence. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. (Publisher’s description)

Lewis, James R., ed. Scientology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.  (Publisher’s description)

Ellingsen, Mark. When did Jesus become Republican?: rescuing our country and our values from the right : strategies for a post-Bush America. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. (Publisher’s description)

Ethics

Garcia, Robert K., and Nathan L. King, eds. Is goodness without God good enough?: a debate on faith, secularism, and ethics. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009. (Publisher’s description)

Wadell, Paul J. Happiness and the Christian moral life: an introduction to Christian ethics. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. (Publisher’s description)

White, Richard. Radical virtues: moral wisdom and the ethics of contemporary life. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2008. (Publisher’s description)

Taylor, Kathleen. Cruelty: human evil and the human brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. (Publisher’s description)