Customer Reviews

Poisons: From Hemlock to Botox to the Killer Bean of Calabar

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The author gives all sorts of anecdotes about poisons, toxins, and various other chemicals that are dangerous to humans and animals. Some of the stories he weaves throughout the text are utterly absorbing and even mildly shocking! I came away from this book even more convinced that if I definitely don't want to die from poison of any kind, any brand, or derived from any plant! The slow, agonizing death that occurs from poison has been largely overlooked by society, and this is a perplexing oversight. Poisonous substances are truly fascinating, but dreadful when ingested, inhaled, or injected into a man or woman. A very well-written, superbly documented, and engaging book. I highly recommend it!

Life has its paradoxes, ironies, incomprehensible mysteries - and admittedly some are heartrending. We want to know - everything. But this book from its very precise and accurate description on the DJ makes it clear - we're not in for a tome about poison from the beginning of time to this moment. It is meant to be a delightful mix (as a great mystery novel can be) of information, science, history, and entertainment. And its such a compellingly wonderful read as well as a beautifully designed book. Just great!!

In this very entertaining and authoritative book, the author discusses various types of poisons, their effects and their uses throughout the ages. Some of these discussions are rather technical, but readers who are less interested in these details and, as a result, fly over them will not lose track of the book's main story lines. Since it appears that various poisons can be found in so many different places in nature, it's a wonder that the human race has managed to survive. Although this is a serious book about a serious subject, the author's choice of words renders the prose at times tongue-in-cheek and at times downright humorous. Complete with a glossary of poisons as well as a bibliography, this book should be enjoyed by anyone.

Poisons have been a part of our lives since the earliest days. They are in the air, the water, plants, and the soil. This is not referring to pollution but to naturally occurring poisons. In this fascinating book, Peter Macinnis weaves together history, medicine, chemistry and other disciplines to tell a story of poisons.

This book is rife with interesting anecdotes.

The variety of hemlock that reportedly was drunk by Socrates was also served as a sandwich to an unsuspecting Dad in England. His unassuming children thought it was parsley, a close relative.

How much did ergot rye poisoning contribute to the Salem witch hysteria?

Why did so many people of the nineteenth century take arsenic as `medicinal' purposes?

The craftsmen who made headwear from felt that was bonded by a mercury compound inevitably suffered mercury poisoning. One symptom of such poisoning is insanity, leaving us with the phrase `Mad As A Hatter'.

Poisons have been used in medicine, as murder weapons, pest control, cosmetology and weapons of war and terror and they still are. The part on nineteenth century food additives still keeps me awake at night.

The author includes a long bibliography, lending some authoity to his facts. He is careful not to bog the reader down in too much scientific detail but does include enough to satisfy the mildly curious and provide a launching point for more research.

This book was a (macabre) delight to read.

I don't see it, but this book should be labeled -- 'For those with a touch of the macabre."

Except that the show is over, this would have been the Adams family's favorite bed time reader. As with the show, we have a fascination with sinister deadly things - so long as they are carefully kept at arms length.

This book keeps is a delightful mix of chemistry and anecdotes written in a light hearted humorous manner, for instance: 'Marijuana makes its active ingredient to discourage cattle from eating it, because cattle, unlike humans, do not like being stoned.'

This book is so fascinating that I was left hungering for more. Specifically Mr. Macinnis, do a short anecdote on Erwin Rommel and the poison he was given to drink as a result of the attempt on Hitler's life. What was it, was it fast and easy as some reports say he was promised, or a very bad ten or twenty minutes? And what about the L pills reportedly given to spies and agents for use if captured. And by the way what about Himmler and Goring. Why there's probably enough for a second volume.

In brief: If you are looking for a book on the history of poisons, poisoners, and toxicology, this book will leave you disappointed. It deals with poisons in the broadest sense, devoting only a few chapters to criminal cases (all fairly well known and dealt with elsewhere). The book seems to ramble as it progresses touching on everything from bats in Guam to toxic clean-up in the U.S. (The chapter on cosmetic poisons was particularly frustrating because Macinnis lists plenty of products but never talks about any specific cases of poisoning or illness associated with them.)
The author frequently omits dates so it's impossible to tell when particular medical advances or discoveries are being made. I should also say that I considered the author's politcal rants heavy-handed and out of place. I wish he had spent more time listing more exotic poisons (or even touching on product tampering or the changes that made procurement of poisons more difficult or anything subject-related) rather than bashing women who use botox, supporters of the death penalty, and the evils of western industrialism.

In detail:
In later chapters, Macinnis throws out some fun trivia about arsenical face washes and belladonna eye drops, but he says nothing about what kind of effects these toxic products may have had on their users.

Sometimes, it's impossible to tell whether he is making a statement or attributing a statement to a source. For example, he mentions Alfred Taylor's speculation on the dangers of women using savin oil as an abortifacient. He closes the paragraph by stating, "Women traditionally grew a number of herbs that could, when applied the right way, relive them of an unwanted burden. But how safe were these old remedies? Used correctly, thery were still reasonably safe-- and effective." Is that Taylor's reasoning? And if not, is the author daft? My reading has suggested that for an "herb" to cause an abortion, the dose would have to be so high that the toxin would most likely kill the mother.

The second half of the book is almost entirely devoted to work-place poisoning (by eeeevil bosses) and environmental poisoning (by eeeeevil corporations). Even if you're on the author's side, his politics come across as heavy handed (e.g. "As we have seen, we are prepared to poison our world, so long as there is a profit to be made.")

At one point, he cites the damage done to reefs by modern fishermen "seeking live fish for the gourmet seafood trade." Okay, a legitimate concern. But then he follows it up with, "The original [indigenous] users of this method would only have used stepefiers to stun the fish in a stream, without any lasting harm to the ecosystem." How does he know? There was no EPA watching indiginous peoples to see which species they wiped out or how they may have altered a given ecosystem. Maybe the cyanide-based poison had a different but equally destructive effect on the stream's ecosystem.

I'm an avid consumer of short cultural histories of everyday items: The History of the World in Six Glasses, Cod - A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Pancake: A Global History, Salt: A World History, The World of Caffeine, and others. The best of them use the form of short, story-rich chapters to provide reliable information that's engaging and somehow worth knowing. The worst of them mistake style for substance: they string together bunches of anecdotes without notable concern for accuracy or significance.

Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses is an excellent example of the former. MacInnis's Poisons is a sad example of the latter. Three shortcomings stand out:

1. the book is disorganized -- the opening chapter ("A Slew of Poisoners") is just a bunch of one- or two-page crime stories, mostly concerning people who put poison in food. The second chapter, on food and poisons, is the same: more short stories of people putting poison in food. And the third . . .

2. the book is poorly written -- the stories ramble and lack narrative focus, details are often fudged (for example, a speech was said to be given "before 1881") and the author is given to pointless rants (for example, a discussion of the production of small amounts of alcohol in the human gut is followed by an aside about the government wanting to slap a tax on it). The imprecision speaks to shallow, incomplete research. He points out that alcohol is a poison which humans survive through the production of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH: basically, the enzymes that allow people to "burn off" consumed alcohol). Macinnis raises an important point -- Native Americans are far more likely to suffer alcohol addiction and death than are other ethnicities -- but does it with a borderline-racist aside and a vague reference to the fact that Native Americans produce a "less effective" form of the chemical. Until that point, the text gave no hint that there was more than one form of ADH and the author immediately abandons the issue with no further word about these enzymes, their significance, when we figured this out, or a host of other questions. The ranting, which crops up once or twice per chapter, speaks to the author's attempt to portray himself as a curmudgeon or some similarly-colorful creature.

3. the author is wrong -- not always, but not rarely. He claims, for example, that before the emergence of germ theory, all illness was taken as evidence of poisoning which required purging. No. Not even a little. The dominant medical paradigm in the centuries before germ theory was "humoural theory," which held that illness was a manifestation of the imbalance of four humours in the body. It's a dumb theory, but near universal for much of the millenium before the 1800s. While that one statement isn't disastrous, the fact is that MacInnis was so careless in dealing with it signals that I can't trust him to get it right.

Mr. Macinnis describes himself on the book jacket as a "museum educator" (which I take to mean, "I'm the interpreter who walks with tour groups and tries to make this stuff come alive") and, on the web, as a "writer and talker." This book reads as the work of a talker: someone concerned less with being right than being colorful.

I rarely feel compelled to write book reviews, but this book was so unusual that I felt I had to. "Poisons" has its interesting moments, but as several other reviewers have mentioned the author has an annoying habit of rambling and failing to follow through with topics that have been brought up. The analogy desribed in one of the reviews of throwing a stack of index cards with notes into the air and then randomly arranging them into a book is particularly apt. I almost didn't continue after reading the first chapter, which seemed almost like reading a pure stream of consciousness. The gray sidebars continue to confuse me, as there seems to be no rhyme nor reason why these passages were set apart from the main text. Granted the topic is broad in both its scientific and historical scope, and much of the information is good, but the lack of solid editing has made this book a chore to read.

Macinnis takes a difficult subject -- the history of toxins complete with chemistry lessons -- and makes it witty and entertaining without loosing any of the fascinating details. Whether a historian curious about poison, a writer in need of a dangerous muse, or simply the man off the street unsure what might be looking in his next drink, this book will satisfy.

My interest in poisons and their facinating link to mankind is longstanding.It stretches back to my youth when I saw an old Charles Bronson movie called The Mechanic.There was a scene toward the end where Jon Michael Vincent poisons his mentor and utters the word "Brusine" and then goes on to explain its action,effect and knows full well the outcome,rapid death.That planted the seed in my brain as to the secret world of poisons and has since stimulated my interest.The knowledge of this unique subject matter as it pertains to the public health as well as my family's and my own, especially in these dangerous times we live in only help to enforce in me a need to understand not only the cause and mechanism of injury but the antidotes and cures.Unless one is a trained toxicologist there really is no reason to review such information aside from casual entertainment or in my case practical application and cure.This book does touch upon many aspects of historical poisoning and offers some interesting tidbits of poison throughout the world's evolution.However it does not have a good flow and most often superficially touches upon the subject matter.It does offer food for thought and can be used as a starting point for deeper research but on the whole it does not satisfy.As other reviewers have indicated there are curious grey boxes noted throughout the book akin to the kind you see in textbooks.My question is why are they there? The information could have easily been incorporated into the body of the text. The thought process and overall presentation of ideas are fragmented,jumbled and frequently caused a sense of irritation while reading.Some poisons are broken down to the bio-chemical and cellular level, something someone with a PH.D or medical background could understand yet some are scantily touched upon for perhaps someone at the high school level to grasp.This uneveness is what I'm talking about.I must admit it did take an effort to stay with it and finish it to the end.If one is looking for a more comprehensive text on the subject of poison keep looking, trust me, they are out there but I'll let you discover them on your own.This tome is for the casual reader of this subject but not for the serious student of toxicology.I really hate to knock a book but 2 stars is all I can give here. Save your money.