Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Did you know the book club is now an online indie bookstore?! Your one-stop shop for nonfiction. Grab a book club pick, subscribe to our book box, books featured on the podcast (like this one), YA/kids section, morbid cookbooks, and more! Check it out here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with one of the best science writers out there, Sam Kean, with his new book, The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History

Spanning a million years of history, the mysteries in these pages include fabled relics, legendary cities, mythical species, and undeciphered languages that have bedeviled seekers for centuries.

Perhaps the single most common theme across all of history is loss. The loss of lands, loss of sacred objects, loss of languages, of rights, of life—the past groans with disappearances of all kinds. This enthralling narrative collects the most spellbinding tales of these experiences and weaves them into a thoughtful meditation on what it all means across the sweep of human history and the scope of human lives, including:

• The long-lost city of Troy
• The hidden tomb of Genghis Khan
• The destruction of the fabled library of Alexandria
• The near-destruction of the Mona Lisa and other art
• The decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
• The extinction—and potential resurrection—of dodos, mammoths, and other iconic species

Provocative, surprising, and above all entertaining, this globe-trotting narrative acknowledges the sheer scale of humanity’s losses, celebrates the treasures we have managed to retain, and reveals why they continue to captivate us centuries later.

Enjoy the episode, friends!

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

You can purchase the book, out TODAY is paperback, on the MCBC Online Bookstore. Comes with a signed bookplate!

I sat down with the one and only David Baron to discuss his book The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.

About the book: Long before NASA began contemplating a visit to our neighboring world, a turn-of-the-century Mars craze invaded the public’s imagination, here thrillingly retold in David Baron’s The Martians.

“There is Life on the Planet Mars” —New York Times, December 9, 1906.

This New York Times headline was no joke.

In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as best-selling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania.

At the center of Baron’s historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed “canals” etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities. The public fell in love with the ambitious amateur astronomer who shared his findings in speeches and wildly popular books.

While at first people treated the Martians whimsically—Martians headlining Broadway shows, biologists speculating whether they were winged or gilled—the discussion quickly became serious. Inventor Nikola Tesla announced he had received radio signals from Mars; Alexander Graham Bell agreed there was “no escape from the conviction” that intelligent beings inhabited the planet. Martian excitement reached its zenith when Lowell financed an expedition to photograph Mars from Chile’s Atacama Desert, resulting in what newspapers hailed as proof of the Martian canals’ existence.

Triumph quickly yielded to tragedy. Those wild claims and highly speculative photographs emboldened Lowell’s critics, whose withering attacks gathered steam and eventually wrecked the man and his theory—but not the fervor he had started. Although Lowell would die discredited and delusional in 1916, the Mars frenzy spurred a nascent literary genre called science fiction, and the world’s sense of its place in the universe would never be the same.

Today, the red planet maintains its grip on the public’s imagination. Many see Mars as civilization’s destiny—the first step toward our becoming an interplanetary species—but, as David Baron demonstrates, this tendency to project our hopes onto the world next door is hardly new. The Martians is a scintillating and necessary reminder that while we look to Mars for answers, what we often find are mirrors of ourselves.

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Season 3, Episode 8!

Join the Book Club, subscribe to our book box, and support our small business here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

This episode is available ad-free for our Patreon members and releases slightly early! Become a Patreon Pal today and check out other episodes, along with bonus bits not available to the general public... https://patreon.com/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub?

In August, the Morbidly Curious Book Club read "American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century" by Shannon Lee Dawdy!

Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife. As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Dawdy knows that how a society treats its dead yields powerful clues about its beliefs and values. As someone who has experienced loss herself, she knows there is no way to tell this story without also reexamining her own views about death and dying. In this meditative and gently humorous book, Dawdy embarks on a transformative journey across the United States, talking to funeral directors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, and ordinary people from all walks of life. What she discovers is that, by reinventing death, Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection across generations. She also confronts the seeming contradiction that American death is becoming at the same time more materialistic and more spiritual. Written in conjunction with a documentary film project, American Afterlives features images by cinematographer Daniel Zox that provide their own testament to our rapidly changing attitudes toward death and the afterlife.

Watch the doc here: https://ilikedirtfilm.com/

About the author: Shannon Lee Dawdy is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her fieldwork combines archival, ethnographic, and archaeological methods to understand how objects and landscapes mediate human life.

Check out her Substack here: https://substack.com/@shannonleedawdy

TW for the book: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/58d3fe4f-c3cb-482f-a7a4-3b1dacfd9e34

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with the one and only Dr Ashely Alker to discuss her book 99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them.

Buy it with a signed bookplate here! https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/99-ways-to-die-and-how-to-avoid-them

An illuminating, hilarious, and practical guide to 99 of the most terrifying ways to die and how to avoid them from an emergency medicine doctor. Dr. Ashely Alker is a self-described death escapologist—or, in more familiar terms, an emergency medicine doctor. She has seen it all, from flesh-eating bacteria to the work of a serial killer to the more mundane but no less deadly, and her work outwitting the end has uniquely prepared her to write this book. Dr. Alker manages to shock listeners while making them laugh, educating them on how to outsmart a wide range of deadly situations and conditions. Many of the chapters include stories from her experiences in life and medicine, at times heartwarming, others heartbreaking. Sections include explorations of sex, poison, drugs, biological warfare, disease, animals, crime, the elements, and much more. An Anthony Bourdain-style greatest hits tour of death, 99 Ways to Die is entertaining while it informs. Full of valuable advice and wild stories, this riveting listen might just save your life.

Ashely Alker, M.D., M.Sc., is an emergency medicine physician on a mission to improve public health. While completing her master’s degree, Dr. Alker studied at Harvard School of Public Health’s multinational institute in Cyprus, where she lived near the United Nations Green Zone and worked in humanitarian affairs at the Unit for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture. After graduating from the George Washington University School of Medicine, Dr. Alker served as a healthcare advisor for a member of the US Congress. During her residency in emergency medicine at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Alker became a technical consultant and medical screenwriter, improving medical accuracy on over twenty shows, including TV and film for Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Disney. Her nonprofit, Meaningful Media, connects writers, artists, and reporters with certified public health experts to develop scientifically accurate messaging.

TW: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/cb65259b-b36c-4c43-af51-5fe0a22431d9

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Buy the book here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/how-to-kill-a-language-power-resistance-and-the-race-to-save-our-words?_pos=1&_psq=how+to+kill&_psid=da80de954&_ss=e

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with the incredible Sophia Smith Galer to discuss her book How to Kill A Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words.

Languages can be killed in many ways: war, the climate crisis, nationalism, and even quiet choices made at the dinner table. Around the world, an unprecedented shift is drawing speakers toward national and global lingua francas. For some, that means losing the language of parents or grandparents; for many, it is a permanent farewell to systems that carry knowledge, culture, and belonging. With half of our 7,000 languages due to disappear this century, linguicide is one of the most pressing cultural emergencies of our age. In How to Kill a Language, journalist Sophia Smith Galer travels across continents and generations to chart this phenomenon. In Ecuador, she sees firsthand how shame deters parents from passing Kichwa onto their children. In Oman, she learns about languages with roots older than Arabic but never officially recognized. And in Italy, she searches for her Nonna’s dialët, which is vanishing from diaspora communities and Italy itself. But languages can also be reclaimed: We meet the Karuk tribe of California, pioneering a grassroots language immersion program, and the storytellers challenging the criminalization of Kurdish. And in her discussion of Hebrew, Smith Galer reckons with the unintended consequences of raising a language seemingly from the grave. Part investigation, part travelogue from a disappearing world, How to Kill a Language exposes the true costs of this mass extinction event. Brought to life by vivid storytelling and Smith Galer’s own experience with language loss, it’s a fierce rallying cry for a multilingual future.

Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist who has reported for the BBC and VICE News around the world. She studied Spanish and Arabic at Durham University, and in 2022 British Vogue selected her as one of the 25 most influential women in the UK.

TW: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/cfbcfc43-253d-4b65-9b29-9f3969874fb8

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Welcome to a very special episode! I got the opportunity to chat with Amy Bruni, author of Life with the Afterlife, which we read for the book club back in the day...Amy, though, has recently released cookbooks! And her new one, Cuisine to Kill For, is available TODAY, July 28th, 2026!

Buy the cookbooks here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/collections/coffee-table-books-cookbooks-and-more

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

From bestselling author, paranormal investigator, and Kindred Spirits co-host Amy Bruni, Cuisine to Kill For intertwines the macabre with the culinary to uncover some of history’s most gruesome true crime stories and the ghosts they left behind.

Whether set in a haunted castle, a mysterious hotel, an abandoned prison, or a popular pub, these paranormal tales span the entire globe—and their accompanying culinary treats are equally wide-ranging. Featuring nearly 60 locations, this book includes:

• Gruesome true crime tales paired with spine-tingling paranormal encounters
• 59 recipes inspired by history, local flavors, or even eerie menu items served at these haunted spots
• Authentic vintage photographs from each haunted site, bringing these violent histories to life
• Mysteriously mouthwatering food photography, styled to inspire a killer kitchen experience

Sink your teeth into tempting dishes and devilish drinks, including:

• Sunday Roast with Gravy from Ten Bells Pub in England (Jack the Ripper, anyone?)
• Meat Stew with Polenta and Egg from Romania’s foreboding Bran Castle
• The Elderflower Rose Gin Trifle from Canada’s stunning Empress Hotel
• Louis XV’s Drinking Chocolate from the Palace of Versailles
• The Reindeer Fart from Alaska’s spirited Red Onion Saloon
• Shrimp Wiggle from the Pennhurst Asylum in Pennsylvania (only if you dare)

Whether you're drawn to the paranormal, obsessed with true crime, or simply hungry for a historic culinary escape, this cookbook is for:

• True crime aficionados who love a good (and gory) backstory
• History buffs and travel enthusiasts fascinated by the darker side of iconic locations
• Hosts and entertainers craving unique ways to captivate guests
• Foodies with guts to try centuries-old—and disturbingly “authentic”—recipes

Amy Bruni effortlessly merges her love of the mysterious with jaw-droppingly delicious recipes, offering a cookbook that’s as deathly as it is delectable. Cuisine To Kill For isn’t just a collection of recipes; it’s a passport to haunted history with every chilling page. If you’ve got an appetite for eerie tales, blood-curdling history, and global flavors, this haunted cookbook is your ultimate culinary companion.

Amy Bruni is a professional paranormal investigator, author, podcaster, and TV host. In 2007 she began appearing on Ghost Hunters, one of the longest-running and highest-rated paranormal television shows. Now, she’s the co-star and executive producer of The Travel Channel’s Kindred Spirits and host of the true crime podcast Haunted Road. Amy is the owner of Strange Escapes, a company offering paranormal excursions to some of America’s most notoriously haunted destinations. She is the author of Life with the Afterlife, and currently resides in Newport, Rhode Island.

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Season 3 Episode 6!

Join the Book Club, subscribe to our book box, and support our small business here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

This episode is available ad-free for our Patreon members, and releases slightly early! Become a Patreon Pal today, and check out other episodes, along with bonus bits not included for the general public... https://patreon.com/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub?

In July, the Morbidly Curious Book Club read "Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum" by Antonia Hylton!

For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers through the ninety-three-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Antonia Hylton blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade’s worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations. As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.

Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist at NBC News reporting on politics and civil rights, and the co-host of the hit podcast Southlake and Grapevine. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she received prizes for her investigative research on race, mass incarceration and the history of psychiatry. She lives in Brooklyn.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5fbd9700-bf4c-4bf3-aef2-75f840c8687c

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Buy the book here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/the-summer-of-death-the-great-heat-wave-of-1936-and-the-making-of-modern-day-america

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with Geoff Williams to discuss his book The Summer of Death: The Great Heat Wave of 1936 and the Making of Modern-Day America, 90 years after what was deemed "the worst day."

A riveting historic narrative that tells the iconic story of the great heat wave that ravaged the continent in the last gasps of the Dust Bowl. In 1936, after one of the coldest winters on record, North America experienced a heat wave that remains unmatched today. Thanks to a combination of an unusually warm sea surface in the Atlantic and Pacific, stagnating high-pressure, drought, and poor farming techniques, temperatures soared across virtually every state (and the territory of Alaska) for months. This summer, the sun aimed its deadly rays at more than 11,000 Americans and 1,000 Canadians. Air conditioning was uncommon, workers’ rights were few, and in an age before high blood pressure medication, a lot of middle-aged adults, toiling in the sun, were literally working themselves to death. This was a summer in which there was almost no escape from the 100-plus temperatures, and woe to those who tried. Men, women, and children rushed into rivers to cool off, only to drown. Desperate people slept on roofs to catch a breeze, only to roll over and plummet to their deaths. Young and old, rich and poor, human and animal, it didn’t really matter. If the heat wanted you, it was going to get you. The heat wave of 1936 sparked massive social changes and technological advances, as well as improvements in health care, and it ignited an ongoing impassioned national dialogue about climate change that continues, to varying degrees, to this day. Filled with vivid detail and characters as intense as the oppressive heat itself, The Summer of Death is the definitive narrative history about this paradigm changing season. In the tradition of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time and Edward P. Kohn’s Hot Time in the Old Town, The Summer of Death reveals a unique and vital chapter of American history, one that could portend dire consequences for our future.

Geoff Williams is the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America and Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever, also available from Pegasus Books. He lives near Dayton, Ohio.

Follow us (and Geoff) over on BlueSky! https://bsky.app/profile/morbidlycuriousbc.bsky.social

https://bsky.app/profile/geoffwill.bsky.social

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Welcome to a special BONUS episode, where I chat with an author about their nonfiction book that is morbidly curious book club adjacent, but it hasn't been a pick. Thus, a bonus episode!

Buy the book here: https://morbidlycuriousbookclub.myshopify.com/products/lost-amelia-earharts-three-mysterious-deaths-and-one-extraordinary-life?_pos=1&_psq=lost&_psid=b7a88ae11&_ss=e

Join the book club here: https://www.morbidlycuriousbookclub.com/

I sat down with Rachel Hartigan to discuss her book Lost: Amelia Earhart's Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life on the anniversary of her disappearance.

When Amelia Earhart’s plane disappeared in 1937, the clues poured in, attracting wild conspiracies about her tragic fate. In Lost, former National Geographic reporter Rachel Hartigan delves into Earhart’s disappearance, introducing a host of eccentric characters who have become obsessed with finding the truth. Did the great aviator crash land near the Marshall Islands, only to be captured by Japanese soldiers? Did she manage to land on Nikumaroro Island but die of injury or starvation? Or did she run out of fuel and crash into the ocean? Interspersed with the search for Earhart is the story of her extraordinary life: her unstable childhood, her itinerant early career, and how a PR-savvy publisher transformed her into an aviation icon and became her husband in an unconventional marriage. In the spirit of nonfiction blockbusters like The Lost City of Z, Hartigan draws us into the world of Earhart’s devotees and unspools a beguiling tale. The theories lead Hartigan from the pilot’s birthplace of Atchison, Kansas to an expedition on a remote Pacific Island, where forensic dogs attempt to recover a potential sample of Earhart’s DNA. As tantilizing new evidence mounts, Hartigan and her fellow investigators descend deeper into a world of conspiracy and obsession. Through its irresistible characters, prodigious research, and haunting images, Lost reveals not just why we remember Amelia Earhart as a trailblazer and adventurer, but why unsolved mysteries keep us forever searching for answers.

Rachel Hartigan reported on science and history at National Geographic for more than a decade, twice voyaging to the uninhabited Pacific atoll where some people think Amelia Earhart died. A former editor of the Washington Post's Book World, she also covered education and culture for U.S. News & World Report. She lives near Washington, D.C.

TW can be found here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5893c9cd-a8c5-48dc-9cb0-7b134ee6d0a4

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Season 3 Episode 6!

In June, the Morbidly Curious Book Club read "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" by Alexa Hagerty!

About the book: Throughout Guatemala’s thirty-six-year armed conflict, state forces killed more than two hundred thousand people. Argentina’s military dictatorship disappeared up to thirty thousand people. In the wake of genocidal violence, families of the missing searched for the truth. Young scientists joined their fight against impunity. Gathering evidence in the face of intimidation and death threats, they pioneered the field of forensic exhumation for human rights. In Still Life with Bones, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost. Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual—a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence. Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.

About the author: Alexa Hagerty is an anthropologist researching science, technology, and human rights. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and is an associate fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research has received honors and funding from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Ethnological Society, among other institutions. She has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Social Anthropology, and Palais de Tokyo.

TW for the book can be found here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/758b940a-b9ca-4320-9395-ad45adf7c921

Alexa's website: https://www.alexahagerty.com/

Subscribe to her Substack here: https://alexahagerty.substack.com/

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