Recounts the sensational 1896 murder trial of Mary Alice Livingston, who was accused of murdering her mother with an arsenic-laced pail of clam chowder and faced the possibility of becoming the first woman to be executed in New York's new-fangled electric chair.
James D. Livingston's professional career was mostly in physics, first with GE and later with MIT, and most of his writings in the 20th century were in physics, including an undergraduate textbook and a popular-science book (Driving Force: The Natural Magic of Magnets). Moving into the 21st century, he gradually moved into retirement from physics research and teaching, and began to broaden his writing topics into history, a long-time interest of his.
Results in book form include A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Woman's Rights (2004, co-authored with his wife Sherry Penney) and Arsenic and Clam Chowder: Murder in Gilded Age New York (2010). Both books focus on 19th-century female relatives of Jim's. Martha Wright is his great-great grandmother, a prominent activist in the woman's rights and abolition movements. The central character of Arsenic and Clam Chowder is Mary Alice Livingston, a black-sheep cousin who was accused of murdering her mother in 1895. Mary Alice is not nearly as admirable as Martha Wright, but she's also very interesting. Often black sheep can be more interesting than all those white ones.
Coming in 2011 is a return to popular science, Rising Force: The Magic of Magnetic Levitation (Harvard University Press). He expects it to be uplifting.
