This month offers a plethora of excellent new nonfiction, including work by Hermione Lee, Orlando Swain, Sarah Haas, and more. Matt O’Hara, The Flying Death: Poison, Plunder, and the Quest for a Miracle Medicine in the Amazon In 1938, sickly, scheming Richard Gill made his way down the Amazon river in search of the poison native tribes used for their blow darts: curare. American by birth, Gill believed that curare had the potential to heal any number of diseases, including his own multiple sclerosis.
If he could corner the market on exports to North America and Europe, Gill thought, then he stood to make a fortune—as long he got to curare before the big drug companies did. In this gripping true narrative, historian Matt O’Hara introduces us to the opportunists, adventurers, and chancers who raced both to find curare and figure out a way to make money off it. But as curare transforms the nature of anesthetics across the globe, O’Hara shows us how those well-funded personalities used, manipulated, and discarded the indigenous people who first learned curare’s secrets.
Gill would never recover from his voyage, and neither would the people he used to get there. Olivia Swarthout, The Wordspotter’s Guide: A Jaunt Through Our Etymological Past Etymological study walks a fine line between dry and delightful. Olivia Swarthout announces on which side she intends to land right in the subtitle, and she delivers.
This book manages to deliver on the promise of the jaunt without losing any of the rigor. Swarthout leads reader on a researched trip (nothing so arduous as a journey) through the history of well-chosen English words. Did you know that boycott is actually a proper name of one English jerk?
English land agent Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832–1897), who was responsible for enforcing unfair policies upon Irish tenants under threat of eviction. In response, Boycott’s community collectively shunned and refused to do business with him. That’s one you can pull out at parties for the rest of your life.
Especially parties in Ireland. Jessica Craig-Martin, I Regret I Am Able to Attend: A Life Among the Artists The writer and photographer Jessica Craig-Martin is known for her relentlessly un-gauzy portraits of high society. When she wields her camera for the Condé glossies, she focuses her lens on the beads of sweat smearing a socialite’s makeup, or a frozen and dead-eyed smile on a power broker.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
