Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Did you know the book club is now an online indie bookstore?! Your one-stop shop for nonfiction. Grab a book club pick, subscribe to our book box, books featured on the podcast (like this one that you're listening to), YA/kids section, morbid cookbooks, and more! Check it out here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/

I sat down with the remarkable Dr. Marcia Chatelain to discuss her latest book, How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.

In How Bright the Path Grows, Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.

How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.

MARCIA CHATELAIN is a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls and Franchise, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, the Hagley Prize for Business History, and the Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

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Season 3 episode nine:

Our September book was Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery by the late Dr. Ira Rutkow.

From his obituary:

Ira Rutkow, age 77, beloved husband, father, and grandfather, passed away on January 16, 2026, two months after being diagnosed with advanced bile duct cancer. Born on October 13, 1948, in Newark, New Jersey, Ira dedicated his life to the practice of surgery and the study of medical and surgical history. After graduating from Union College (New York) he earned his medical degree from St. Louis University and trained as a general surgeon at Johns Hopkins. He went on to receive an MPH and doctorate from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, setting the stage for a remarkable career that blended clinical expertise with a passion for historical scholarship.

Ira was an entrepreneur and innovator. In the mid-1980s, he established the Hernia Center, a novel approach to patient care that would serve as a model for countless practitioners. He built and oversaw a free-standing medical complex containing a full-service operating room. While running the Hernia Center, he developed and patented a mesh plug that became a standard approach for modern hernia repair. Surgeons from around the world trained with him at the Hernia Center to learn and adopt his method.

In addition, Ira authored eight influential books, including his latest, Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery (2022), which was an Editor's Choice in the New York Times Book Review. His other notable works include Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America (2010); James A. Garfield (2006), part of Times Books' American Presidents series edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr; Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (2005); American Surgery: An Illustrated History (1998); Surgery: An Illustrated History (1993), named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and a two-volume bibliography, The History of Surgery in the United States (1992 and 1988). He was not only a prolific author but also served as an editor for multiple surgical textbooks and contributed numerous articles to professional journals.

Ira's achievements earned him several prestigious awards, including the American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award (1998) and the Fletcher Pratt Literary Award of the Civil War Roundtable of New York (2005). He was inducted into the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars (2003) and awarded Union College's Founders' Medal (2007) as well as St. Louis University School of Medicine's Alumni Merit Award (2015). His passion for history and medicine will live on through his writings and the many lives he touched throughout his career.

Ira was an avid collector of rare and unique surgical and hernia texts as well as nineteenth-century surgical instrument sets.

Ira's warmth, humor, and wisdom will be remembered by his friends, colleagues, and his cherished family, including his wife of 54 years, Beth; children, Lainie and Eric; son-in-law, Adam Spira; daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Herman; and his beloved grandsons, Alex Spira and Benjamin Rutkow.

With his wife Beth, Ira loved splitting his time between New York City and a farm in the Hudson Valley and spending time with friends and family. He will be dearly missed by all who knew him.

Contributions in Ira's memory may be made to the hospice that cared for him in his final days, Gilchrist Center Towson (Maryland), or a charity of your choice.

Some charities I found:

• Doctors without Borders - Provides emergency and surgical care in conflict zones and disaster areas.
• Lifebox - Works on making surgery safer worldwide, including getting pulse oximeters and safety training into operating rooms that lack them.
• American College of Surgeons - "Improving access to optimal surgical care for medically underserved communities through surgical service and education."
• Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation - "Providing hope for improved treatments and outcomes, for those affected by cholangiocarcinoma, also known as bile duct cancer."
• Gilchrist Center Towson - Hospice center from his obituary where Ira spent his final days.
• Hospice Foundation of America - "HFA supports individuals and families facing life-limiting illness, educates hospice and grief professionals, and conducts programs and research to improve care and empower informed medical decision making."
• Also, his alma maters, Union College, St. Louis University School of Medicine, and Johns Hopkins, all take gifts in someone's name.

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Did you know the book club is now an online indie bookstore?! Your one-stop shop for nonfiction. Grab a book club pick, subscribe to our book box, books featured on the podcast (like this one that you're listening to), YA/kids section, morbid cookbooks, and more! Check it out here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with the one and only Dr. Karen Tang to discuss her book, It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (But Were Never Told)

An inclusive and essential new resource for reproductive health--including period problems, pelvic pain, menopause, fertility, sexual health, vaginal and urinary conditions, and overall wellbeing--from leading expert and fierce advocate Dr. Karen Tang

"Dr. Karen Tang is a literal godsend to women in a time still filled with great ignorance in medical research and financing of women's health initiatives. Please read her book, follow her on Instagram as I have, and feel blessed as I do to have an advocate for our body, our health, and our human rights." ―Sharon Stone

Did you know that up to 90% of women experience menstrual abnormalities or pelvic issues in their lifetime? Yet these conditions are overwhelmingly misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or dismissed. The root causes for these issues, such as PCOS, endometriosis, fibroids, ovarian cysts, PMDD, or pelvic floor dysfunction, don't receive the stream of funding for research and new treatments that other conditions do, despite affecting up to half the population. Dr. Karen Tang is on a mission to transform how we engage with our bodies and our healthcare. It's Not Hysteria is a comprehensive guide to common conditions and potential treatment options, with practical tools such as symptom prompts and sample questions for your provider, to equip readers to take control of their gynecologic health. Reproductive healthcare, from abortion to gender-affirming care, is under siege. The onus continues to fall on patients to find and advocate for the care they need. In the face of uncertainty and misinformation, It's Not Hysteria is destined to become a new classic that educates and empowers women and those assigned female at birth.

KAREN TANG, MD, MPH, is a board-certified gynecologist and minimally invasive gynecologic surgeon who is an internationally recognized leader in reproductive health. She received her medical degree and masters in public health at Columbia University, and trained in obstetrics and gynecology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center / Harvard Medical School. As @KarenTangMD, she reaches millions of viewers with her educational videos about period health, pelvic pain, and reproductive rights. Dr. Tang has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Forbes, NBC News, and Oprah Daily, among other media outlets. She lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband and three children.

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Did you know the book club is now an online indie bookstore?! Your one-stop shop for nonfiction. Grab a book club pick, subscribe to our book box, books featured on the podcast (like this one that you're listening to), YA/kids section, morbid cookbooks, and more! Check it out here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with Andrew Guthrie Ferguson to discuss his latest book, and release it on Constitution Day: Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.

For consumers living in a digitally connected world, smart technologies have built an inescapable trap of digital self-surveillance. Smart cars, smart homes, smart watches, and smart medical devices track our most private activities and intimate patterns. While these devices allow users to receive personal insights by monitoring their every move, that data can be accessed by police and prosecutors looking to find incriminating clues. Digital technology exposes everyone, everywhere, all at once, and we have few laws to regulate it.

In Your Data Will Be Used Against You, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson warns us of how the rise of sensor-driven technology, social media monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be weaponized against democratic values and personal freedoms. At the same time, that data will solve crimes, radically transforming how criminal cases are prosecuted. Ferguson explores how this proliferation of private data in combination with public surveillance networks promises new ways to solve previously unsolvable crimes, but also leaves us vulnerable to governmental overreach and abuse. He argues for legal interventions that address the threat of digital self-surveillance and provides concrete suggestions about how legislators, judges, and communities should respond.

As consumers, citizens, and potential subjects of surveillance, the questions in this book must be confronted now, before the trap of surveillance captures us completely. Providing a stark warning of the dangers of digital self-surveillance, Your Data Will be Used Against You is a defense of civil liberties against the growing threat of data-driven policing.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. He is a national expert on new surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice. He is the author of the 2018 PROSE Award winning book, The Rise of Big Data Policing. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Did you know the book club is now an online indie bookstore?! Your one-stop shop for nonfiction. Grab a book club pick, subscribe to our book box, books featured on the podcast (like this one), YA/kids section, morbid cookbooks, and more! Check it out here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with one of the best science writers out there, Sam Kean, with his new book, The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History

Spanning a million years of history, the mysteries in these pages include fabled relics, legendary cities, mythical species, and undeciphered languages that have bedeviled seekers for centuries.

Perhaps the single most common theme across all of history is loss. The loss of lands, loss of sacred objects, loss of languages, of rights, of life—the past groans with disappearances of all kinds. This enthralling narrative collects the most spellbinding tales of these experiences and weaves them into a thoughtful meditation on what it all means across the sweep of human history and the scope of human lives, including:

• The long-lost city of Troy
• The hidden tomb of Genghis Khan
• The destruction of the fabled library of Alexandria
• The near-destruction of the Mona Lisa and other art
• The decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
• The extinction—and potential resurrection—of dodos, mammoths, and other iconic species

Provocative, surprising, and above all entertaining, this globe-trotting narrative acknowledges the sheer scale of humanity’s losses, celebrates the treasures we have managed to retain, and reveals why they continue to captivate us centuries later.

Enjoy the episode, friends!

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

You can purchase the book, out TODAY is paperback, on the MCBC Online Bookstore. Comes with a signed bookplate!

I sat down with the one and only David Baron to discuss his book The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.

About the book: Long before NASA began contemplating a visit to our neighboring world, a turn-of-the-century Mars craze invaded the public’s imagination, here thrillingly retold in David Baron’s The Martians.

“There is Life on the Planet Mars” —New York Times, December 9, 1906.

This New York Times headline was no joke.

In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as best-selling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania.

At the center of Baron’s historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed “canals” etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities. The public fell in love with the ambitious amateur astronomer who shared his findings in speeches and wildly popular books.

While at first people treated the Martians whimsically—Martians headlining Broadway shows, biologists speculating whether they were winged or gilled—the discussion quickly became serious. Inventor Nikola Tesla announced he had received radio signals from Mars; Alexander Graham Bell agreed there was “no escape from the conviction” that intelligent beings inhabited the planet. Martian excitement reached its zenith when Lowell financed an expedition to photograph Mars from Chile’s Atacama Desert, resulting in what newspapers hailed as proof of the Martian canals’ existence.

Triumph quickly yielded to tragedy. Those wild claims and highly speculative photographs emboldened Lowell’s critics, whose withering attacks gathered steam and eventually wrecked the man and his theory—but not the fervor he had started. Although Lowell would die discredited and delusional in 1916, the Mars frenzy spurred a nascent literary genre called science fiction, and the world’s sense of its place in the universe would never be the same.

Today, the red planet maintains its grip on the public’s imagination. Many see Mars as civilization’s destiny—the first step toward our becoming an interplanetary species—but, as David Baron demonstrates, this tendency to project our hopes onto the world next door is hardly new. The Martians is a scintillating and necessary reminder that while we look to Mars for answers, what we often find are mirrors of ourselves.

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Season 3, Episode 8!

Join the Book Club, subscribe to our book box, and support our small business here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

This episode is available ad-free for our Patreon members and releases slightly early! Become a Patreon Pal today and check out other episodes, along with bonus bits not available to the general public... https://patreon.com/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub?

In August, the Morbidly Curious Book Club read "American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century" by Shannon Lee Dawdy!

Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife. As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Dawdy knows that how a society treats its dead yields powerful clues about its beliefs and values. As someone who has experienced loss herself, she knows there is no way to tell this story without also reexamining her own views about death and dying. In this meditative and gently humorous book, Dawdy embarks on a transformative journey across the United States, talking to funeral directors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, and ordinary people from all walks of life. What she discovers is that, by reinventing death, Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection across generations. She also confronts the seeming contradiction that American death is becoming at the same time more materialistic and more spiritual. Written in conjunction with a documentary film project, American Afterlives features images by cinematographer Daniel Zox that provide their own testament to our rapidly changing attitudes toward death and the afterlife.

Watch the doc here: https://ilikedirtfilm.com/

About the author: Shannon Lee Dawdy is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods to understand how objects and landscapes mediate human life.

Check out her Substack here: https://substack.com/@shannonleedawdy

TW for the book: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/58d3fe4f-c3cb-482f-a7a4-3b1dacfd9e34

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with the one and only Dr Ashely Alker to discuss her book 99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them.

Buy it with a signed bookplate here! https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/99-ways-to-die-and-how-to-avoid-them

An illuminating, hilarious, and practical guide to 99 of the most terrifying ways to die and how to avoid them from an emergency medicine doctor. Dr. Ashely Alker is a self-described death escapologist—or, in more familiar terms, an emergency medicine doctor. She has seen it all, from flesh-eating bacteria to the work of a serial killer to the more mundane but no less deadly, and her work outwitting the end has uniquely prepared her to write this book. Dr. Alker manages to shock listeners while making them laugh, educating them on how to outsmart a wide range of deadly situations and conditions. Many of the chapters include stories from her experiences in life and medicine, at times heartwarming, others heartbreaking. Sections include explorations of sex, poison, drugs, biological warfare, disease, animals, crime, the elements, and much more. An Anthony Bourdain-style greatest hits tour of death, 99 Ways to Die is entertaining while it informs. Full of valuable advice and wild stories, this riveting listen might just save your life.

Ashely Alker, M.D., M.Sc., is an emergency medicine physician on a mission to improve public health. While completing her master’s degree, Dr. Alker studied at Harvard School of Public Health’s multinational institute in Cyprus, where she lived near the United Nations Green Zone and worked in humanitarian affairs at the Unit for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture. After graduating from the George Washington University School of Medicine, Dr. Alker served as a healthcare advisor for a member of the US Congress. During her residency in emergency medicine at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Alker became a technical consultant and medical screenwriter, improving medical accuracy on over twenty shows, including TV and film for Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Disney. Her nonprofit, Meaningful Media, connects writers, artists, and reporters with certified public health experts to develop scientifically accurate messaging.

TW: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/cb65259b-b36c-4c43-af51-5fe0a22431d9

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Buy the book here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/how-to-kill-a-language-power-resistance-and-the-race-to-save-our-words?_pos=1&_psq=how+to+kill&_psid=da80de954&_ss=e

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with the incredible Sophia Smith Galer to discuss her book How to Kill A Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words.

Languages can be killed in many ways: war, the climate crisis, nationalism, and even quiet choices made at the dinner table. Around the world, an unprecedented shift is drawing speakers toward national and global lingua francas. For some, that means losing the language of parents or grandparents; for many, it is a permanent farewell to systems that carry knowledge, culture, and belonging. With half of our 7,000 languages due to disappear this century, linguicide is one of the most pressing cultural emergencies of our age. In How to Kill a Language, journalist Sophia Smith Galer travels across continents and generations to chart this phenomenon. In Ecuador, she sees firsthand how shame deters parents from passing Kichwa onto their children. In Oman, she learns about languages with roots older than Arabic but never officially recognized. And in Italy, she searches for her Nonna’s dialët, which is vanishing from diaspora communities and Italy itself. But languages can also be reclaimed: We meet the Karuk tribe of California, pioneering a grassroots language immersion program, and the storytellers challenging the criminalization of Kurdish. And in her discussion of Hebrew, Smith Galer reckons with the unintended consequences of raising a language seemingly from the grave. Part investigation, part travelogue from a disappearing world, How to Kill a Language exposes the true costs of this mass extinction event. Brought to life by vivid storytelling and Smith Galer’s own experience with language loss, it’s a fierce rallying cry for a multilingual future.

Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist who has reported for the BBC and VICE News around the world. She studied Spanish and Arabic at Durham University, and in 2022 British Vogue selected her as one of the 25 most influential women in the UK.

TW: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/cfbcfc43-253d-4b65-9b29-9f3969874fb8

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Welcome to a very special episode! I got the opportunity to chat with Amy Bruni, author of Life with the Afterlife, which we read for the book club back in the day...Amy, though, has recently released cookbooks! And her new one, Cuisine to Kill For, is available TODAY, July 28th, 2026!

Buy the cookbooks here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/collections/coffee-table-books-cookbooks-and-more

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

From bestselling author, paranormal investigator, and Kindred Spirits co-host Amy Bruni, Cuisine to Kill For intertwines the macabre with the culinary to uncover some of history’s most gruesome true crime stories and the ghosts they left behind.

Whether set in a haunted castle, a mysterious hotel, an abandoned prison, or a popular pub, these paranormal tales span the entire globe—and their accompanying culinary treats are equally wide-ranging. Featuring nearly 60 locations, this book includes:

• Gruesome true crime tales paired with spine-tingling paranormal encounters
• 59 recipes inspired by history, local flavors, or even eerie menu items served at these haunted spots
• Authentic vintage photographs from each haunted site, bringing these violent histories to life
• Mysteriously mouthwatering food photography, styled to inspire a killer kitchen experience

Sink your teeth into tempting dishes and devilish drinks, including:

• Sunday Roast with Gravy from Ten Bells Pub in England (Jack the Ripper, anyone?)
• Meat Stew with Polenta and Egg from Romania’s foreboding Bran Castle
• The Elderflower Rose Gin Trifle from Canada’s stunning Empress Hotel
• Louis XV’s Drinking Chocolate from the Palace of Versailles
• The Reindeer Fart from Alaska’s spirited Red Onion Saloon
• Shrimp Wiggle from the Pennhurst Asylum in Pennsylvania (only if you dare)

Whether you're drawn to the paranormal, obsessed with true crime, or simply hungry for a historic culinary escape, this cookbook is for:

• True crime aficionados who love a good (and gory) backstory
• History buffs and travel enthusiasts fascinated by the darker side of iconic locations
• Hosts and entertainers craving unique ways to captivate guests
• Foodies with guts to try centuries-old—and disturbingly “authentic”—recipes

Amy Bruni effortlessly merges her love of the mysterious with jaw-droppingly delicious recipes, offering a cookbook that’s as deathly as it is delectable. Cuisine To Kill For isn’t just a collection of recipes; it’s a passport to haunted history with every chilling page. If you’ve got an appetite for eerie tales, blood-curdling history, and global flavors, this haunted cookbook is your ultimate culinary companion.

Amy Bruni is a professional paranormal investigator, author, podcaster, and TV host. In 2007 she began appearing on Ghost Hunters, one of the longest-running and highest-rated paranormal television shows. Now, she’s the co-star and executive producer of The Travel Channel’s Kindred Spirits and host of the true crime podcast Haunted Road. Amy is the owner of Strange Escapes, a company offering paranormal excursions to some of America’s most notoriously haunted destinations. She is the author of Life with the Afterlife, and currently resides in Newport, Rhode Island.

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Season 3 Episode 6!

Join the Book Club, subscribe to our book box, and support our small business here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

This episode is available ad-free for our Patreon members, and releases slightly early! Become a Patreon Pal today, and check out other episodes, along with bonus bits not included for the general public... https://patreon.com/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub?

In July, the Morbidly Curious Book Club read "Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum" by Antonia Hylton!

For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers through the ninety-three-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Antonia Hylton blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade’s worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations. As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.

Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist at NBC News reporting on politics and civil rights, and the co-host of the hit podcast Southlake and Grapevine. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she received prizes for her investigative research on race, mass incarceration and the history of psychiatry. She lives in Brooklyn.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5fbd9700-bf4c-4bf3-aef2-75f840c8687c

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Buy the book here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/the-summer-of-death-the-great-heat-wave-of-1936-and-the-making-of-modern-day-america

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with Geoff Williams to discuss his book The Summer of Death: The Great Heat Wave of 1936 and the Making of Modern-Day America, 90 years after what was deemed "the worst day."

A riveting historic narrative that tells the iconic story of the great heat wave that ravaged the continent in the last gasps of the Dust Bowl. In 1936, after one of the coldest winters on record, North America experienced a heat wave that remains unmatched today. Thanks to a combination of an unusually warm sea surface in the Atlantic and Pacific, stagnating high-pressure, drought, and poor farming techniques, temperatures soared across virtually every state (and the territory of Alaska) for months. This summer, the sun aimed its deadly rays at more than 11,000 Americans and 1,000 Canadians. Air conditioning was uncommon, workers’ rights were few, and in an age before high blood pressure medication, a lot of middle-aged adults, toiling in the sun, were literally working themselves to death. This was a summer in which there was almost no escape from the 100-plus temperatures, and woe to those who tried. Men, women, and children rushed into rivers to cool off, only to drown. Desperate people slept on roofs to catch a breeze, only to roll over and plummet to their deaths. Young and old, rich and poor, human and animal, it didn’t really matter. If the heat wanted you, it was going to get you. The heat wave of 1936 sparked massive social changes and technological advances, as well as improvements in health care, and it ignited an ongoing impassioned national dialogue about climate change that continues, to varying degrees, to this day. Filled with vivid detail and characters as intense as the oppressive heat itself, The Summer of Death is the definitive narrative history about this paradigm changing season. In the tradition of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time and Edward P. Kohn’s Hot Time in the Old Town, The Summer of Death reveals a unique and vital chapter of American history, one that could portend dire consequences for our future.

Geoff Williams is the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America and Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever, also available from Pegasus Books. He lives near Dayton, Ohio.

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https://bsky.app/profile/geoffwill.bsky.social

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Buy the book here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/lost-amelia-earharts-three-mysterious-deaths-and-one-extraordinary-life?_pos=1&_psq=lost&_psid=b7a88ae11&_ss=e

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with Rachel Hartigan to discuss her book Lost: Amelia Earhart's Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life on the anniversary of her disappearance.

When Amelia Earhart’s plane disappeared in 1937, the clues poured in, attracting wild conspiracies about her tragic fate. In Lost, former National Geographic reporter Rachel Hartigan delves into Earhart’s disappearance, introducing a host of eccentric characters who have become obsessed with finding the truth. Did the great aviator crash land near the Marshall Islands, only to be captured by Japanese soldiers? Did she manage to land on Nikumaroro Island but die of injury or starvation? Or did she run out of fuel and crash into the ocean? Interspersed with the search for Earhart is the story of her extraordinary life: her unstable childhood, her itinerant early career, and how a PR-savvy publisher transformed her into an aviation icon and became her husband in an unconventional marriage. In the spirit of nonfiction blockbusters like The Lost City of Z, Hartigan draws us into the world of Earhart’s devotees and unspools a beguiling tale. The theories lead Hartigan from the pilot’s birthplace of Atchison, Kansas to an expedition on a remote Pacific Island, where forensic dogs attempt to recover a potential sample of Earhart’s DNA. As tantilizing new evidence mounts, Hartigan and her fellow investigators descend deeper into a world of conspiracy and obsession. Through its irresistible characters, prodigious research, and haunting images, Lost reveals not just why we remember Amelia Earhart as a trailblazer and adventurer, but why unsolved mysteries keep us forever searching for answers.

Rachel Hartigan reported on science and history at National Geographic for more than a decade, twice voyaging to the uninhabited Pacific atoll where some people think Amelia Earhart died. A former editor of the Washington Post's Book World, she also covered education and culture for U.S. News & World Report. She lives near Washington, D.C.

TW can be found here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5893c9cd-a8c5-48dc-9cb0-7b134ee6d0a4

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Season 3 Episode 6!

In June, the Morbidly Curious Book Club read "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" by Alexa Hagerty!

About the book: Throughout Guatemala’s thirty-six-year armed conflict, state forces killed more than two hundred thousand people. Argentina’s military dictatorship disappeared up to thirty thousand people. In the wake of genocidal violence, families of the missing searched for the truth. Young scientists joined their fight against impunity. Gathering evidence in the face of intimidation and death threats, they pioneered the field of forensic exhumation for human rights. In Still Life with Bones, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost. Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual—a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence. Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.

About the author: Alexa Hagerty is an anthropologist researching science, technology, and human rights. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and is an associate fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research has received honors and funding from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Ethnological Society, among other institutions. She has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Social Anthropology, and Palais de Tokyo.

TW for the book can be found here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/758b940a-b9ca-4320-9395-ad45adf7c921

Alexa's website: https://www.alexahagerty.com/

Subscribe to her Substack here: https://alexahagerty.substack.com/

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Buy the book here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/the-secret-history-of-bigfoot-field-notes-on-a-north-american-monster-copy?_pos=6&_sid=14f28ed57&_ss=r

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

Patricia's website here: https://www.patriciacornwell.com/

Patricia Cornwell is best known for her international bestselling thriller series about forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Every story comes from somewhere, and Scarpetta’s began when Patricia Cornwell embedded herself in a morgue. In this achingly honest memoir, Cornwell excavates her own life, detailing her traumatic childhood being raised by neglectful parents, her father abandoning the young family on Christmas day, her mother being institutionalized twice, an abusive foster family, and developing a parental relationship with evangelist Billy Graham’s wife Ruth. Cornwell depicts a harrowing hospitalization and near-death car accident. She unflinchingly shares overcoming obstacles that later gave her the ambition to become an award-winning police reporter. From there it was research in a medical examiner’s office that would turn into a full-time job. She would become a forensic expert and worldwide publishing phenomenon. Cornwell leaves no stone unturned in this deeply candid account of her life, offering inspiring insight into what made her into the international sensation she is today.

Patricia Cornwell is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and widely considered one of the world's top crime writers. In 1990, Patricia Cornwell sold her first novel, Postmortem, while working at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. An auspicious debut, it went on to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity Awards, as well as the French Prix du Roman d’Aventures—the first book ever to claim all these distinctions in a single year. Growing into an international phenomenon, the Scarpetta series won Cornwell the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author, the Gold Dagger Award, the RBA Thriller Award, and the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her contributions to literary and artistic development. Today, Cornwell’s novels and iconic characters are known around the world. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has written the definitive nonfiction account of Jack the Ripper’s identity, cookbooks, a children’s book, a biography of Ruth Graham, and three other fictional series based on the characters Win Garano, Andy Brazil, and Captain Calli Chase. Cornwell continues exploring the latest space-age technologies and threats relevant to contemporary life. Her interests range from the morgue to artificial intelligence and include visits to Interpol, the Pentagon, the U.S. Secret Service, and NASA. Cornwell was born in Miami. She grew up in Montreat, North Carolina, and now lives and works in Boston.

Check out Patricia's website here!

Check The Storygraph for the TW here!

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

Murderland is out TODAY in paperback! https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/murderland-crime-and-bloodlust-in-the-time-of-serial-killers?_pos=1&_sid=37fbaecae&_ss=r

https://www.carolinefraser.net/

About Murderland: Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing? As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem—the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson—Fraser’s Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy’s Tacoma stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was hardly unique in the West. As Fraser’s investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of these smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, including some who grew up to become serial killers. A propulsive nonfiction thriller, Murderland transcends true-crime voyeurism and noir mythology, taking readers on a profound quest into the dark heart of the real American berserk.

Caroline Fraser is the author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize, and the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year. She is also the author of God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, and her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in New Mexico.

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Welcome to an archive episode!

Check out our new website: morbidlycuriousbookclub.com

Early and ad-free for Patreon members: https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub

In 2024, I launched this podcast to delve deeper into our book club's nonfiction selections by engaging directly with the authors, the experts behind these compelling works. However, the book club has been around since 2021...so there are some 'archive' picks that we need to discuss!

In August of 2023, we read what would become a staple for the book club: "We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys" by Erin Kimmerle!

Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle investigates of the notorious Dozier Boys School—the true story behind the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Nickel Boys—and the contentious process to exhume the graves of the boys buried there in order to reunite them with their families. The Arthur G. Dozier Boys School was a well-guarded secret in Florida for over a century, until reports of cruelty, abuse, and “mysterious” deaths shut the institution down in 2011. Established in 1900, the juvenile reform school accepted children as young as six years of age for crimes as harmless as truancy or trespassing. The boys sent there, many of whom were Black, were subject to brutal abuse, routinely hired out to local farmers by the school’s management as indentured labor, and died either at the school or attempting to escape its brutal conditions. In the wake of the school’s shutdown, Erin Kimmerle, a leading forensic anthropologist, stepped in to locate the school’s graveyard to determine the number of graves and who was buried there, thus beginning the process of reuniting the boys with their families through forensic and DNA testing. The school’s poorly kept accounting suggested some thirty-one boys were buried in unmarked graves in a remote field on the school’s property. The real number was at least twice that. Kimmerle’s work did not go unnoticed; residents and local law enforcement threatened and harassed her team in their eagerness to control the truth she was uncovering—one she continues to investigate to this day. We Carry Their Bones is a detailed account of Jim Crow America and an indictment of the reform school system as we know it. It’s also a fascinating dive into the science of forensic anthropology and an important retelling of the extraordinary efforts taken to bring these lost children home to their families—an endeavor that created a political firestorm and a dramatic reckoning with racism and shame in the legacy of America.  

Erin H. Kimmerle is an American forensic anthropologist, artist, and executive director of the Institute of Forensic Anthropology & Applied Science at the University of South Florida. She was awarded the 2020 AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

Find the book's TW here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/e2f00bfb-6469-4451-87af-6afa94959806

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Welcome to Season 3 Episode 5!

Join the Book Club, Subscribe to our book box, support our small business here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

This episode is available ad-free for our Patreon members, and releases slightly early! Become a Patreon Pal today, and check out other episodes, along with bonus bits not included for the general public... https://patreon.com/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub?

In May, the Morbidly Curious Book Club read "Expert Witness: The Weight of Our Testimony When Justice Hangs in the Balance" by Ann Wolbert Burgess & Steven Matthew Constantine!

From the author of the critically-acclaimed true crime account, A Killer By Design (the inspiration behind Hulu's original docuseries, Mastermind), a groundbreaking look into the crucial role played by expert witnesses in the most high-profile criminal cases, based on Dr. Ann Burgess' personal experiences within the criminal justice system. Written through Burgess' singular lens of compassion and lived experience, Expert Witness pulls back the curtain on some of the biggest cases in the last thirty years--from Bill Cosby to the Menendez brothers to Larry Nassar--to reveal the deeply human stories behind the trials that have captivated a nation. The book explores the role of expert witnesses in high-stakes court cases, offering first-hand accounts and never-before-seen interviews with attorneys, victims, and offenders. Expert Witness places readers inside the mind of the nation's most prominent courtroom expert, following Burgess as she takes on one seismic case after the next. Throughout the narrative, each case deepens the reader's understanding of the art and science of expert testimony, taking readers from the women's movement of the 1970s to the #MeToo movement of today--one of the largest social reckonings in recent history. At its core, Expert Witness is a story of empowerment. It's a story of compassion and the ever-increasing need for individuals to stand up and speak truth to power or to popular opinion. And it's ultimately a story of how revolutionary one voice can be.

Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, DNSc., APRN, is a leading forensic and psychiatric nurse who worked with the FBI for over two decades. She is currently a professor at the Boston College Connell School of Nursing, and she lives in Boston, MA.

Steven Matthew Constantine (cowriter) is the assistant director of marketing and communications at the Boston College Connell School of Nursing. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in Boston, MA.

TW can be found here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/d414428c-a932-438a-8960-ae081f5d3cff

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

Hallie's website here: https://hallierubenhold.com/

About Story of a Murder: On February 1, 1910, the vivacious, diamond-adorned music hall performer Belle Elmore suddenly vanished from her home, causing alarm among her friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Their demands for an investigation would lead to the unearthing of a gruesome secret and trigger a fevered international manhunt for Belle’s husband, medical fraudster Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. Ethel Le Neve, Crippen’s typist and lover, who fled with Crippen in disguise, has always hidden in the shadows of this tale–was she really just “an innocent young girl” in thrall to a powerful older man? And was there an equally sinister story behind the death of Crippen’s first wife, Charlotte? Brimming with twists and featuring a carnival cast of eccentric entertainers, star lawyers, zealous detectives, medics and liars, STORY OF A MURDER offers an electrifying snapshot of Britain and America at the dawn of the modern era. 

About The Five: Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffeehouses, lived on country estates; they breathed ink dust from printing presses and escaped human traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time--but their greatest misfortune was to be born women. 

TW for The Five: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/1b3f4bef-f77c-4820-894a-599e55e7c885

TW for Story of a Murder: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/91d3c9ea-0249-4d02-b746-64da658f2e09

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Welcome to an archive episode!

Check out our new website: morbidlycuriousbookclub.com

Early and ad-free for Patreon members: https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub

In 2024, I launched this podcast to delve deeper into our book club's nonfiction selections by engaging directly with the authors, the experts behind these compelling works. However, the book club has been around since 2021...so there are some 'archive' picks that we need to discuss!

In September of 2023, we read what would become a staple for the book club: "WHAT THE DEAD KNOW, Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator" by Barbara Butcher!

When Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism, she found an unexpected lifeline in a job at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in NYC. As only the second woman ever hired for the role—and the first to last more than three months—she became a vital force in the world of forensic science and criminal investigations. Over the next two decades, Butcher worked thousands of cases: gruesome homicides, suspicious suicides, heartbreaking scenes involving underage victims, and complex mass casualty investigations. In her unforgettable account, she invites readers into the gritty, high-stakes world of crime-scene investigation, from the autopsy room and morgue to tense moments at active crime scenes. Along the way, she uncovered how confronting death every day gave her a new perspective on life—and ultimately saved her from becoming a statistic herself. In vivid, darkly humorous prose, Butcher recounts how she narrowly avoided a booby-trapped suicide scene, and how, during 9/11, she and her colleagues worked tirelessly to identify victims using scraps of clothing, DNA, and the memories of grieving loved ones. Her honesty, resilience, and sharp wit make this a standout in the genre of first responder memoirs and women in law enforcement.

Learn more about Barbara here: https://www.barbarabutcherofficial.com/

The Death Investigator trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ilLAP28qN0&time_continue=1&source_ve_path=NzY3NTg&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.barbarabutcherofficial.com%2F&embeds_referring_origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.barbarabutcherofficial.com

Find the book here with TW: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/369dae9c-ddfd-4d4c-872a-9f83acf2aefd

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