Happy Monday bookish people! I hope you’re all having a good day today.
Today I am bringing you my book review of the non-fiction book A Taste of Poison by Neil Bradbury. Usually I write reviews in four sections but that wouldn’t work with this book so instead I am going to write a paragraph about my overall thoughts of this book.
A Taste of Poison is a non-fiction book detailing 11 of the world’s deadliest poisons and pages of information about each one. As a researcher of crime fiction and a writer myself I found this book very useful and interesting because it was broken down into different sections. There would be information about the poison itself, where it came from what it was and then it talked about the uses of each poison and I found this part the most interesting because it didn’t focus entirely on the negative uses of each poison but also the ways that scientists and doctors throughout the years have found positive uses for them, for example insulin can be used in good and bad ways. After the information section the book details real life cases where the different poisons had been used, some of them I had read about before but most of them I hadn’t. Then finally each chapter ended with a description of what each poison would do to the body, what symptoms it would cause and that sort of thing. For me this book was a fascinating read.
Blurb/Synopsis:
A brilliant blend of science and crime, ‘A TASTE FOR POISON’ reveals how eleven notorious poisons affect the body – through the murders in which they were used.
As any listener or reader of murder mysteries can tell you, poison is one of the most enduring – and popular – weapons of choice for a scheming murderer. It can be slipped into a drink, smeared onto the tip of an arrow or the handle of a door, even filtered through the air we breathe. But how exactly do these poisons work to break our bodies down, and what can we learn from the damage they inflict?
In a fascinating blend of popular science, medical history, and true crime, Dr. Neil Bradbury explores this most morbidly captivating method of murder from a cellular level. Alongside real-life accounts of murderers and their crimes – some notorious, some forgotten, some still unsolved – are the equally compelling stories of the poisons involved: eleven molecules of death that work their way through the human body and, paradoxically, illuminate the way in which our bodies function.
Drawn from historical records and current news headlines, A Taste for Poison weaves together the tales of spurned lovers, shady scientists, medical professionals and political assassins to show how the precise systems of the body can be impaired to lethal effect through the use of poison. From the deadly origins of the gin and tonic cocktail to the arsenic-laced wallpaper in Napoleon’s bedroom, ‘A TASTE FOR POISON’ leads listeners on a riveting tour of the intricate, complex systems that keep us alive – or don’t.
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