Peculiar Book Club Podcast

Discover the astonishing story of the world’s greatest lost treasures in this enthralling narrative by a writer with “the anecdotal flourishes of Oliver Sacks and the populist accessibility of Malcolm Gladwell.” (Entertainment Weekly)

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

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Daniel Kraus returns to Peculiar Book Club to dive into a horror movie classic! His latest examines his favorite film’s importance to our history, culture, and psychology, creating a perfect blend of research and memoir in the vein of Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation. Kraus first saw George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead when he was five years old. Through watching it approximately three hundred times since (yes really), Kraus discovered the many ways the film is tied to his childhood trauma and how its influence has carried into his adulthood. He couldn’t help but wonder: Are there other admirers of the film out there who feel the same?Partially Devoured uses a frame-by-frame deep dive into Night of the Living Dead to produce a kaleidoscopic cultural investigation of the film’s importance and to examine the author’s early life of rural isolation and local violence. Join us for a live discussion with the author where we can really get into the… meat… of things.

Episode was recorded live October 22, 2026.

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Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Human History on Drugs we are reviewing the addiction movie Requiem for a Dream. Davey will also briefly discuss the TV Show Brilliant Minds and why we decided to skip it.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into what has been called one of the most realistic examples of drug addiction ever put on film. We'll discuss the themes of addiction, how it doesn't have to just be drugs, and how institutions fail our main characters.

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The true-crime saga of the intertwined lives of a Native spiritual leader and a prominent literary figure—and their shared work in their pursuit to right a tragic wrongful conviction.
Silas John Edwards—a charismatic Apache medicine man—was known as a controversial figure on Apache reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, where white authorities determined to maintain control over reservation life. When his wife, Margaret, was brutally murdered in 1933, Silas John was tried and convicted—receiving a sentence of life in prison. The key piece of evidence against Silas John was a rock found near Margaret's body, scratched with his initials, “S. J. E.".
Were the scratched initials an attempt to frame a man whose independent path was deemed troublesome? Eighteen years into Silas John’s sentence, the celebrated writer of the Perry Mason mysteries, Erle Stanley Gardner, received a desperate letter from the incarcerated medicine man. Gardner and Silas John met in prison and joined forces to reinvestigate the case. Under the auspices of Gardner’s Court of Last Resort, an organization like today’s Innocence Project that investigated cases of wrongful conviction, Gardner traveled through Arizona’s varied reservation landscapes to hunt for clues.
Together Silas John and Gardner attempted to unravel the flimsy evidence—including dubious footprint casts and questionable claims of Apache custom—to shatter the "cement silence" of prison and fight for the freedom of a historically important spiritual leader. The Case of the Autographed Corpse details a dramatic and little-known episode in American history and two men’s unwavering commitment to the truth.

In 1908, a French book, Le Corset by Ludovic O'Followell, told of the terrible suffering of women tormented by and subject to their corsets. X-ray Pictures showed injury, the text spoke of illness and disarray. It had a profound effect. But it was also… wrong. In THE BAD CORSET, Rebecca Gibson takes us on a fascinating exploration to upend O’Followell’s work. Approaching the topic from a scientific perspective, and reproducing facsimiles of the original text, with translations and annotations, tells a different story. What we see instead are the presumptions and anxieties of male medical professionals. The women who wore these perceived instruments of torture were not victims or dupes—they had agency, which after all, is what a turn of the century doctor most feared from his lady patients. Join us to talk about this feminist approach to female agency and choice, a revised look at how women shape their bodies and their lives.

Episode was recorded live September 24, 2026.

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How are some people so much smarter than the rest of us? Where do visionary creatives and savvy decision-makers like Vincent van Gogh, Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, Maya Angelou, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Wayne Gretzky, Warren Buffett, and William Shakespeare get their extraordinary mental abilities? In 2021, researchers at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, renowned for collaborations with NASA, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, announced they had the answer. They named it Primal Intelligence. And they published scientific proof that Primal Intelligence was impossible for computers—but could be strengthened in humans. The human brain, and not AI, has this superpower, if only we could reach it. And that’s how the US Army Special Ops got involved.Imagine being Angus Fletcher, in the Ohio State English Department, and having the military swing by to pick your brain. What resulted, however, was a peculiar alliance. With Fletcher’s help, they developed Primal training for its most classified units. The training succeeded. The Operators saw the future faster. They healed quicker from trauma. In life-and-death situations, they chose wiser. Soon it was being tested on civilians—and then school children—with the same results. What was this amazing training all about? Actually, it’s about you. Your brain. It’s basic operating system was built to run on uncertainty through future-leaping intuition, and we’ve been breaking it down through education systems trying to ape computer learning. Turns out, AI is NOT the future. The human brain is. So join us live to talk to Angus about your own PRIMAL INTELLIGENCE.

Episode was recorded live September 10, 2026.

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Did you know that chronic head pain, from blinding migraines to severe headache disorders known as “clusters,” affects 40% of the population? And that science, largely, shrugs over the cause? Many suffer in silence, afraid of being chided as “merely” having a headache, when in fact this is a horrifically debilitating disorder. If you are one of them, or know someone who is, this is a book for you. In The Headache, science journalist Tom Zeller reveals the struggling science behind a group of disorders that is as much a curse as a cultural punchline, and leads to key insights into the nature of pain itself.Guided by his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches, Zeller gives the inside track. He visits cutting-edge clinics; interviews dozens of doctors, neurologists, and fellow headache patients; participates in clinical trials for multi-million-dollar new medicines; and even experiments with psilocybin in search of relief. Along the way, Zeller traces the longer arc of mystery around headaches, from prehistoric skull surgery to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that, in the throes of a migraine, “language runs dry,” to reveal how headaches became one of the most under-researched afflictions in medicine—and how that is slowly starting to change. Join us to talk live with Zeller about all things headache, and take a journey into the inner workings of the human nervous system.

Episode was recorded live August 13, 2026.

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Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Custodians of Wonder, we are reviewing the legendary mafia film The Godfather.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into one of the greatest movies of all time. We'll discuss the themes of passing things down to your children, how Michael couldn't stay away from the family business, and making offers that people can't refuse.

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Every so often, I find myself reading history and thinking ‘were they on DRUGS?’ Well, the probably answer is: Yes! Alexander the Great was a sloppy drunk and William Shakespeare was a stoner; Steve Jobs believed taking LSD helped him create the Apple computer, and Sigmund Freud loved cocaine so much he took it all the time and prescribed it to his patients. Hard to believe? Don’t worry, in Human History on Drugs, Sam Kelly gives us the receipts. Here’s more of that peculiar history your teachers never told you. With chapters spanning from Ancient Greece (“The Oracle of Delphi Was Huffing Fumes”) to modern times (“Carl Sagan Got Astronomically High”), Kelly's research covers all manner of eras, places, and, of course, drugs.History is rife with drug use and drug users, and Human History on Drugs takes us through those highs (pun intended) and lows on a witty and entertaining ride that uncovers their mind-boggling impact on our past. Join us to chat live with Sam, and get a preview of the book by visiting his mega-hit TikTok!

Episode was recorded live July 23, 2026.

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Video by Luis Humanoide from Pixabay

Video by Ha Nguyen from Pixabay

Psychedelic Witch Track Filmy Ghost & JackCote

Psychedelic Dream by Geoff Harvey - Purple Planet Music source (Free Music Archive) and license type (CC BY-NC-ND)

Science writer Sadie Dingfelder has always known that she’s a little quirky. But while she’s made some strange mistakes over the years, it’s not until she accosts a stranger in a grocery store (whom she thinks is her husband) that she realizes something is amiss.With a mixture of curiosity and dread, Dingfelder starts contacting neuroscientists and lands herself in scores of studies. In the course of her nerdy midlife crisis, she discovers that she is emphatically not neurotypical. She has prosopagnosia (faceblindness), stereoblindness, aphantasia (an inability to create mental imagery), and a condition called severely deficient autobiographical memory.As Dingfelder begins to see herself more clearly, she discovers a vast well of hidden neurodiversity in the world at large. There are so many different flavors of human consciousness, and most of us just assume that ours is the norm. Can you visualize? Do you have an inner monologue? Are you always 100 percent sure whether you know someone or not? If you can perform any of these mental feats, you may be surprised to learn that many people—including Dingfelder—can’t. Her book DO I KNOW YOU offers a lively blend of personal narrative and popular science, and you can chat with Sadie live, ask questions, and share experience!

Episode was recorded live June 25, 2026.

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