I’ve been enthralled with history since childhood thanks to my late father, a college professor with a passion for the past. Our house was always filled with history books of all types and my father was a veritable encyclopedia who enjoyed answering my questions. When I became a crime reporter in the early 2000s, my predilection for history merged with my interest in crime and I ended up writing four books centered around historical crimes ranging in time from the 1700s to the 1960s.
I wrote
Satellite Boy: The International Manhunt for a Master Thief That Launched the Modern Communication Age
Erik Larson is a master at combining crime and history with perfect pacing and interweaving narratives.
While best known for Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck, the next book in his bibliography, released in 2006, deserves as much acclaim. Larson does a brilliant job of combining the stories of the hunt for murderer Hawley Crippen, and that of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor and electrical engineer, responsible for the wireless telegraph, which revolutionized mass communication.
The real star of the book is Larson’s vivid descriptions that bring to life turn-of-the-century London and the lives of the two men at the center of the narrative. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in crime, history, science, and a fast-paced true-life adventure.
A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s “great hush.”
In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners; scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world…
In The Poison Squad, Deborah Blum explores the era in American history before food and drugs were regulated, a wild time indeed when many patent medicines contained not only morphine or cocaine but a plethora of poisonous substances that killed many users.
Even worse, unregulated candy containing adulterated ingredients led to many children’s deaths. Blum not only does a wonderful job breaking down the science and politics involved in this fascinating story but gives a vivid picture of the late 19th century and early 20th in the U.S.
Today, when many are calling for deregulation, The Poison Squad is even more relevant.
The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad.
From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change
By the end of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. "Milk" might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was…
In the first century, Rome’s celebrated love poet Ovid finds himself in exile, courtesy of an irate Emperor, in the far-flung town of Tomis. Appalled at being banished to a barbarous region at the very edge of the Empire, Ovid soon discovers that he has a far more urgent -…
Destiny of the Republic brings to life an era in American history full of incredible change in science, politics, and culture following the end of the Civil War.
Candice Millard beautifully draws the various threads of the story of the presidency, assassination, and death of James Garfield together in lucid detail. Millard’s dive into the politics around advancements in medical science with Garfield as its unwitting victim is the centerpiece of this fascinating book.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The extraordinary account of James Garfield's rise from poverty to the American presidency, and the dramatic history of his assassination and legacy, from the bestselling author of The River of Doubt.
James Abram Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, a renowned congressman, and a reluctant presidential candidate who took on the nation's corrupt political establishment. But four months after Garfield's inauguration in 1881, he was shot in the back by a deranged office-seeker named Charles Guiteau. Garfield…
Norco '80 is the kind of book that sticks with you long after you’ve finished reading it.
Peter Houlahan captures late 1970s Southern California in all its strangeness and gives a blow-by-blow account of one of America’s wildest bank robberies with perfect pacing that continues to ratchet up the action page after page. The shockinglyviolent robbery by five landscapers whose leader was an apocalyptic born-again Christian reshaped American law enforcement.
And we’restill feeling the aftereffects more than forty years later in the form of militarized police forces across the country.It’s a book that will keep you up at night telling yourself you’ll quit reading after one more chapter but, most likely, you’ll just keep going.
5 young men. 32 destroyed police vehicles. 1 spectacular bank robbery. This “cinematic” true crime story transports readers to the scene of one of the most shocking bank heists in U.S. history―a crime that’s almost too wild to be real (The New York Times Book Review).
Norco ’80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men―led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian―attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in U.S. history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, this Edgar Award finalist for Best…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon gives the viewer a window into a piece of Native American culture in 1920s Oklahoma as well as the inner workings of the brand-new FBI under its narcissistic and despotic head J. Edgar Hoover.
For me, the heart of the story is the Osage people and their struggle to prosper in the face of racism, corruption, and murder. That’s not to say that Grann doesn’t do a brilliant job with the FBI investigation into the killings.
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. But the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. Together with the Osage he and his undercover…
Spanning the underworld haunts of Montreal to Havana and Miami in the early days of the Cold War, Satellite Boy reveals the unlikely connection between an audacious bank heist and the “other Space Race” that gave birth to the modern communication age.
Satellite Boytells the largely forgotten, high-stakes story of two equally driven men—a criminal mastermind named Georges Lemay, and Harold Rosen, a brilliant engineer—who inadvertently launched the modern era when their lives briefly collided in the spring of 1965. Brimming with criminal panache and technological intrigue, the book is set against the turbulent and iconic period that includes the moon landing and the civil rights movement.
In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first —and to date only— Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000…
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in…
