Download or read book Poisoning the Press written by Mark Feldstein and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is March 1972, and the Nixon White House wants Jack Anderson dead. The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, the most famous and feared investigative reporter in the nation, has exposed yet another of the President's dirty secrets. Nixon's operatives are ordered to "stop Anderson at all costs"—permanently. Across the street from the White House, they huddle in a hotel basement to conspire. Should they try "Aspirin Roulette" and break into Anderson's home to plant a poisoned pill in one of his medicine bottles? Could they smear LSD on the journalist's steering wheel, so that he would absorb it through his skin, lose control of his car, and crash? Or stage a routine-looking mugging, making Anderson appear to be one more fatal victim of Washington's notorious street crime? Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture recounts not only the disturbing story of an unprecedented White House conspiracy to assassinate a journalist, but also the larger tale of the bitter quarter-century battle between the postwar era's most embattled politician and its most reviled newsman. The struggle between Nixon and Anderson included bribery, blackmail, forgery, spying, and burglary as well as the White House murder plot. Their vendetta symbolized and accelerated the growing conflict between the government and the press, a clash that would long outlive both men. Mark Feldstein traces the arc of this confrontation between a vindictive president and a flamboyant, crusading muckraker who rifled through garbage and swiped classified papers in pursuit of his prey—stoking the paranoia in Nixon that would ultimately lead to his ruin. The White House plot to poison Anderson, Feldstein argues, is a metaphor for the poisoned political atmosphere that would follow, and the toxic sensationalism that contaminates contemporary media discourse. Melding history and biography, Poisoning the Press unearths significant new information from more than two hundred interviews and thousands of declassified documents and tapes. This is a chronicle of political intrigue and the true price of power for politicians and journalists alike. The result—Washington's modern scandal culture—was Richard Nixon's ultimate revenge.
Download or read book Poisoning the Press written by Mark Avrom Feldstein and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is March 1972, and the Nixon White House wants Jack Anderson dead. The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, the most famous and feared investigative reporter in the nation, has exposed yet another of the President's dirty secrets. Nixon's operatives are ordered to "stop Anderson at all costs", permanently. Across the street from the White House, they huddle in a hotel basement to conspire. Should they try "Aspirin Roulette" and break into Anderson's home to plant a poisoned pill in one of his medicine bottles? Could they smear LSD on the journalist's steering wheel, so that he would absorb it through his skin, lose control of his car, and crash? Or stage a routine-looking mugging, making Anderson appear to be one more fatal victim of Washington's notorious street crime? This book recounts not only the disturbing story of an unprecedented White House conspiracy to assassinate a journalist, but also the larger tale of the bitter quarter-century battle between the postwar era's most embattled politician and its most reviled newsman. The struggle between Nixon and Anderson included bribery, blackmail, forgery, spying, and burglary as well as the White House murder plot. Their vendetta symbolized and accelerated the growing conflict between the government and the press, a clash that would long outlive both men. The author traces the arc of this confrontation between a vindictive president and a flamboyant, crusading muckraker who rifled through garbage and swiped classified papers in pursuit of his prey, stoking the paranoia in Nixon that would ultimately lead to his ruin. The White House plot to poison Anderson, the author argues, is a metaphor for the poisoned political atmosphere that would follow, and the toxic sensationalism that contaminates contemporary media discourse. Melding history and biography, the book unearths significant new information from more than two hundred interviews and thousands of declassified documents and tapes. This is a chronicle of political intrigue and the true price of power for politicians and journalists alike. The result, Washington's modern scandal culture, was Richard Nixon's ultimate revenge.
Download or read book Death of a Dissident written by Alex Goldfarb and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-25 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first reports seemed absurd. A Russian dissident, formerly an employee of the KGB and its successor, the FSB, had seemingly been poisoned in a London hotel. As Alexander Litvinenko's condition worsened, however, and he was transferred to hospital and placed under armed guard, the story took a sinister turn. On 23 November 2006, Litvinenko died, apparently from polonium-210 radiation poisoning. He himself, in a dramatic statement from his deathbed, accused his former employers at the Kremlin of being responsible for his murder. Who was Alexander Litvinenko? What had happened in Russia since the end of the Cold War to make his life there untenable, and even in severe jeopardy in Britain? How did he really die, and who killed him? In his spokesman and close friend, Alex Goldfarb, and widow Marina, we have two people who know more than anyone about the real Sasha Litvinenko, and about his murder. Their riveting book sheds astonishing light not just on these strange and troubling events but also on the biggest crisis in relations with Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Download or read book Our Daily Poison written by Marie-Monique Robin and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2004-09-03 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An enlightening and deeply disturbing account” of the dangerous chemicals that have infiltrated our food, by the Rachel Carson Prize–winning journalist (Booklist). Our Daily Poison is “a gripping and urgent book” for anyone concerned about democracy, corporate power, or public health (Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved). In it, award-winning journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin travels across North America, Europe, and Asia to document the shocking array of chemicals we encounter in our daily lives—from the pesticides that blanket our crops to the additives and plastics that contaminate our food—and their effects on our health over time. Following the trail of the synthetic molecules in our environment and our food, Robin traces the ugly history of industrial chemical production, as well as the shoddy regulatory system for chemical products that still operates today. Using scientific studies, expert testimony, and interviews with farmworkers suffering from acute chronic poisoning, Robin demonstrates how corporate interests—and our own ignorance—may be costing us our lives. “What Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring did for the environmental movement, Robin is doing for awareness of toxins in the food chain.” —Publishers Weekly “This may be one of the most important books of the year.” —Kirkus Reviews “Full of facts, stories, and wisdom.” —The Huffington Post
Download or read book Poisons of the Past written by Mary Allerton Kilbourne Matossian and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did food poisoning cause the Black Plague, the Salem witch-hunts, and other significant events in human history? In this pathbreaking book, historian Mary Kilbourne Matossian argues that epidemics, sporadic outbursts of bizarre behavior, and low fertility and high death rates from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries may have been caused by food poisoning from microfungi in bread, the staple food in Europe and America during this period. "A bold book with a stimulating thesis. Matossian's claims for the role of food poisoning will need to be incorporated into any satisfactory account of past demographic trends."--John Walter, Nature "Matossian's work is innovative and original, modest and reasoned, and opens a door on our general human past that historians have not only ignored, but often did not even know existed."--William Richardson, Environmental History Review "This work demonstrates an impressive variety of cross-national sources. Its broad sweep also reveals the importance of the history of agriculture and food and strengthens the view that the shift from the consumption of mold-poisoned rye bread to the potato significantly contributed to an improvement in the mental and physical health of Europeans and Americans."--Naomi Rogers, Journal of American History "This work is a true botanical-historical tour de force."--Rudolf Schmid, Journal of the International Association of Plant Taxonomy "Intriguing and lucid."--William K. Beatty, Journal of the American Medical Association
Download or read book Pharma written by Gerald Posner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Exorbitant prices for lifesaving drugs, safety recalls affecting tens of millions of Americans, and soaring rates of addiction and overdose on prescription opioids have caused many to lose faith in pharmaceutical companies. Now, Americans are demanding national reckoning with a monolithic industry. In Pharma, award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author Gerald Posner uncovers the real story of the Sacklers, the family that became one of America's wealthiest from the success of OxyContin, their blockbuster narcotic painkiller at the centure of the opioid crisis. The unexpected twists and turns of the Sakler family saga are told against the startling chronicle of a powerful industry that sits at the intersection of public health and profits. Pharma reveals how and why American drug companies have put earnings ahead of patients"--
Download or read book Economic Poisoning written by Adam M. Romero and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arsenic and old waste -- Commercializing chemical warfare -- Manufacturing petrotoxicty -- Public-private partnerships -- From oil well to farm.
Download or read book Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders written by Don Herzog and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-08-06 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conservatism was born as an anguished attack on democracy. So argues Don Herzog in this arrestingly detailed exploration of England's responses to the French Revolution. Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders ushers the reader into the politically lurid world of Regency England. At once history and political theory, absorbing and disquieting, this book challenges our own commitments to and anxieties about democracy. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Untraceable written by Sergei Lebedev and published by New Vessel Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A thriller dipped in poison ... shares some of le Carré’s fascination with secret worlds and the nature of evil." —The New York Times The terrifying, lengthening list of Russia’s use of lethal poisons against its critics has inspired acclaimed author Sergei Lebedev’s latest novel. With uncanny timing, he examines how and why Russia and the Soviet Union have developed horrendous neurotoxins. At its center is a ruthless chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. But Kalitin becomes consumed by guilt over countless deaths from his Faustian pact to create the ultimate venom. When the Soviet Union collapses, the chemist defects and is given a new identity in Western Europe. After another Russian is murdered with Kalitin's poison, his cover is blown and he's drawn into an investigation of the death by Western agents. Two special forces killers are sent to silence him―using his own undetectable poison. In this fast-paced, genre-bending tale, Lebedev weaves suspenseful pages of stunningly beautiful prose exploring the historical trajectories of evil. From Nazi labs, Stalinist plots and the Chechen Wars, to present-day Russia, Lebedev probes the ethical responsibilities of scientists supplying modern tyrants and autocrats with ever newer instruments of retribution, destruction and control.
Download or read book Healing with Poisons written by Yan Liu and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749013 At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically employed as healing agents to cure everything from abdominal pain to epidemic disease. Healing with Poisons explores the ways physicians, religious figures, court officials, and laypersons used toxic substances to both relieve acute illnesses and enhance life. It illustrates how the Chinese concept of du—a word carrying a core meaning of “potency”—led practitioners to devise a variety of methods to transform dangerous poisons into effective medicines. Recounting scandals and controversies involving poisons from the Era of Division to the Tang, historian Yan Liu considers how the concept of du was central to how the people of medieval China perceived both their bodies and the body politic. He also examines the wide range of toxic minerals, plants, and animal products used in classical Chinese pharmacy, including everything from the herb aconite to the popular recreational drug Five-Stone Powder. By recovering alternative modes of understanding wellness and the body’s interaction with foreign substances, this study cautions against arbitrary classifications and exemplifies the importance of paying attention to the technical, political, and cultural conditions in which substances become truly meaningful. Healing with Poisons is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of the University of Buffalo.
Download or read book Silent Snow written by Marla Cone and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A slender but punch-packing overview of the environmental destruction of the Far North” from the award-winning environmental reporter (Kirkus Reviews). Traditionally thought of as the last great unspoiled territory on Earth, the Arctic is in reality home to some of the most severe contamination on the planet. Awarded a major grant by the Pew Charitable Trusts to study the Arctic’s deteriorating environment, Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Marla Cone traveled across the Far North, from Greenland to the Aleutian Islands, to find out why the Arctic has become so toxic. Silent Snow is not only a scientific journey, but a personal one with experiences that range from tracking endangered polar bears in Norway to hunting giant bowhead whales with native Alaskans struggling to protect their livelihood. Through it all, Cone reports with heartbreaking immediacy on the dangers of pollution to native peoples and ecosystems, how Arctic cultures are adapting to this pollution, and what solutions will prevent the crisis from getting worse.
Download or read book The KGB s Poison Factory written by Boris Volodarsky and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2013-11-30 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late November 2006 the world was shaken by the ruthless assassination in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Lt Col of the Russian security service (FSB). The murder was the most notorious crime committed by the Russian intelligence on foreign soil in over three decades. The author, Boris Volodarsky, who was consulted by the Metropolitan Police during the investigation and remains in close contact with Litvinenkos widow, is a former Russian military intelligence officer and an international expert in special operations. His narrative reveals that since 1917 beginning with Lenin and his Cheka the Russian security services have regularly carried out bespoke poisoning operations all over the world to eliminate the enemies of the Kremlin. The author proves that the Litvinenkos poisoning is just one episode in the chain of murders that continues until the present day. Some of these assassinations or attempted assassinations are already known, others are revealed here for the first time. Uniquely Volodarsky has had a personal involvement in almost every each of the 20 cases, from the radioactive thallium poisoning of the Soviet defector Nikolai Khokhlov in Frankfurt in September 1957 to the ricin umbrella murder of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978. "Here, for the fan of murder thrillers and modern history alike, is a cracking good read. In brilliant light we see what lay for nearly a century behind the London polonium poisoning of British citizen Alexander Litvinenko, former Russian. It was just one recent hit by the world's most prolific serial killer -- the Russian state. With original research guided by his insider's eye and scholarly care, Boris Volodarsky recounts scores of murders. Assassination emerges as state policy, as institutionalized bureacracy, as day-to-day routine, as laboratory science, as a branch of medicine researching ways not to stave off death but to deliver it in apparently innocent or accidental forms, and as engineering technology, devising ever-new devices to meet each new requirement, from umbrella tips and cigarette cases and rolled-up newspapers -- to Litvinenko's teacup." Tennent H. Bagley, former CIA chief of Soviet Bloc counterintelligence.
Download or read book Kill Khalid written by Paul McGeough and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [P]roviding a fly-on-the-wall vantage of the rising diplomatic panic that sent shudders through world capitals'' (Toronto Star), Kill Khalid unfolds as a masterpiece of investigative journalism. In 1997, the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad poisoned Hamas leader Khalid Mishal in broad daylight on the streets of Amman, Jordan. As the little-known Palestinian leader slipped into a coma, the Mossad agents' escape was bungled and the episode quickly spiraled into a diplomatic crisis. A series of high-stakes negotiations followed, which ultimately saved Mishal and set the stage for his phenomenal political ascendancy.In Kill Khalid, acclaimed reporter Paul McGeough reconstructs the history of Hamas through exclusive interviews with key players across the Middle East and in Washington, including unprecedented access to Mishal himself, who remains to this day one of the most powerful and enigmatic figures in the region. A ''sobering reminder of how little has been achieved during sixty years of Israeli efforts in Palestine'' (Kirkus), Kill Khalid tracks Hamas's political fortunes across a decade of suicide bombings, political infighting, and increasing public support, culminating in the battle for Gaza in 2007 and the current-day political stalemate.
Download or read book Poisoning Eros written by Monica J. O'Rourke and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes life is unfair. Sometimes life just plain sucks. You do what you can to get by, but sometimes even that isn't enough. Meet Gloria, aging porno star, drug addict, failed wife and mother—seduced into a monstrous world of depraved sex and violent deceit, battling to save her immortal soul and that of her only daughter from Inferno … and you thought your life was hell.
Download or read book Radium Girls written by Claudia Clark and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, a group of women workers hired to apply luminous paint to watch faces and instrument dials found themselves among the first victims of radium poisoning. Claudia Clark's book tells the compelling story of these women, who at first had no idea that the tedious task of dialpainting was any different from the other factory jobs available to them. But after repeated exposure to the radium-laced paint, they began to develop mysterious, often fatal illnesses that they traced to conditions in the workplace. Their fight to have their symptoms recognized as an industrial disease represents an important chapter in the history of modern health and labor policy. Clark's account emphasizes the social and political factors that influenced the responses of the workers, managers, government officials, medical specialists, and legal authorities involved in the case. She enriches the story by exploring contemporary disputes over workplace control, government intervention, and industry-backed medical research. Finally, in appraising the dialpainters' campaign to secure compensation and prevention of further incidents--efforts launched with the help of the reform-minded, middle-class women of the Consumers' League--Clark is able to evaluate the achievements and shortcomings of the industrial health movement as a whole.
Download or read book The Poison Trials written by Alisha Rankin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.
Download or read book The Poison Squad written by Deborah Blum and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad. From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change By the end of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. "Milk" might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was not by accident; food manufacturers had rushed to embrace the rise of industrial chemistry, and were knowingly selling harmful products. Unchecked by government regulation, basic safety, or even labelling requirements, they put profit before the health of their customers. By some estimates, in New York City alone, thousands of children were killed by "embalmed milk" every year. Citizens--activists, journalists, scientists, and women's groups--began agitating for change. But even as protective measures were enacted in Europe, American corporations blocked even modest regulations. Then, in 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University, was named chief chemist of the agriculture department, and the agency began methodically investigating food and drink fraud, even conducting shocking human tests on groups of young men who came to be known as, "The Poison Squad." Over the next thirty years, a titanic struggle took place, with the courageous and fascinating Dr. Wiley campaigning indefatigably for food safety and consumer protection. Together with a gallant cast, including the muckraking reporter Upton Sinclair, whose fiction revealed the horrific truth about the Chicago stockyards; Fannie Farmer, then the most famous cookbook author in the country; and Henry J. Heinz, one of the few food producers who actively advocated for pure food, Dr. Wiley changed history. When the landmark 1906 Food and Drug Act was finally passed, it was known across the land, as "Dr. Wiley's Law." Blum brings to life this timeless and hugely satisfying "David and Goliath" tale with righteous verve and style, driving home the moral imperative of confronting corporate greed and government corruption with a bracing clarity, which speaks resoundingly to the enormous social and political challenges we face today.
