The Poisoner's Handbook

This I saw one day walking through Costco and just grabbed it and put in it my cart.  This is the story of the beginnings of forensic science, in particular the beginnings of forensic toxicology.  It is told through the cases solved by the New York City Medical Examiner's Office in the 1920s mostly, as the dedicated, and undervalued employees there solved cases of poisonings with all new and never tried methods. It's the kind of non fiction I like best, where you learn the science through the stories, and the stories were pretty tasty.

I also learned that there was a speakeasy operator during prohibition called Belle Guinan or Texas Guinan.  According to the internet (and we know we can't really believe the internet) this was, in fact, the inspiration for Star Trek's Guinan.  Just so you know.  (In another book, Cutting for Stone, I learned that Ferengi is an Ethiopian word meaning foreigner.  Who knew you could learn so much about Star Trek from reading non-Star Trek related books!)

Henrietta Lacks

Another very interesting read, this story of Henrietta Lacks is fascinating, well told, but a bit all over the place.   Henrietta Lacks is best known today as HeLa, a cell culture that has been grown in labs for over 50 years and has been used throughout biology and medicine to help us learn about cells, growth, cancer, and other diseases.  The book is less the story of Henrietta, as very little is known about her, as the story of what happened to her cells and her family after her death.  In my opinion, there is too much on her family and not enough on her cells in the story.  We hear all about how her family fell apart after her death, her children were abused by another member of the family, there were drugs and crime, and a lot of anger both about her death and about the doctors taking her cells without her permission, not unknown then or even today.  But we don't really hear a lot of what happened with the cells, except that they are at the center of everything we know today about cell growth.  I would have loved some examples, some followup on any single study that used them rather than just asserting repeatedly how important they have been to science.

Still very much an interesting read.