<p>7/ Overall it&#39;s quick and light reading. I&#39;ve mentioned we seem to have few popular books about chemistry. So, while I&#39;d have liked more out of this, it&#39;s a quality effort and an enjoyable read (setting aside the gruesome parts—and if you don&#39;t mind it&#39;s all about poisoning!). •</p>

<p>I am really so baseline happy and satisfied with life at the moment not even that upset about The Illness just kinda annoyed</p>

<p>6/ Most of all, it&#39;s all about New York! It rarely even mentions other US cities. Most of all, it points out that a lot of what NY was doing was borrowing ideas already extant in Europe. But we never what those were. A global forensic history would have been far better. ↵</p>

<p>5/ The book goes into a fair bit of not-strictly-necessary detail about both animal testing and humans in electric chairs. The details are gruesome and make for painful reading for the squeamish (and could easily be a real turn-off to some of the students it&#39;s assigned it). ↵</p>

<p>4/ The book also has numerous weaknesses. Each chapter is dedicated to one poison, but the conceit doesn&#39;t always work, and some chapters cannot maintain that focus (an editor would have caught this, but perhaps it was too late to rewrite the book). ↵</p>

<p>3/ The science is light but mostly reasonable, if a bit sloppy in spots. It&#39;s the kind of book that could get a kid excited about studying chemistry (which is how our child&#39;s school is using it, as summer reading). If you have studied chemistry, you might wish for a lot more. ↵</p>

<p>2/ The premise mostly works. You can see the transition &quot;in real time&quot;, the political battles that Norris, the head, had to fight, and the tribulations that Gettler, the chief scientist, had to endure. Tammany Hall, the Great Depression, etc. are all involved. ↵</p>

<p>1/ Blum has written a fascinating but also mixed book about chemistry, in the guise of a history of forensics. (CSI, anyone?) She describes the transition of New York&#39;s forensics from a political to scientific department through a series of crimes and chemicals. ↵<br /><a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/BookReview" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>BookReview</span></a></p>

<p>so the trillionaire nepobaby has been investing in everything in the United States: tech, media, hedge funds, sports, housing</p><p>in a thousands of years old tradition of sheiks and sultans of colonizing countries by co-opting their elites and them making millionaires and now billionaires who will jump like lemmings on his one command. </p><p>GAZA is the sacrificial lamb for the would be nuclear sultan and the international cartels feasting at his throughs. </p><p>but 2024 isn&#39;t about Gaza, right? </p><p>🧵</p>