Poison and Poisoning in Science, Fiction and Cinema PDF Download

Author: Heike Klippel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319649094
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book is about poison and poisonings; it explores the facts, fears and fictions that surround this fascinating topic. Poisons attract attention because they are both dangerous and hard to discover. Secretive and invisible, they are a challenging object of representation. How do science studies, literature, and especially film—the medium of the visible—explain and show what is hidden? How can we deal with uncertainties emerging from the ambivalence of dangerous substances? These considerations lead the editors of this volume to the notion of “precarious identities” as a key discursive marker of poisons and related substances. This book is unique in facilitating a multi-faceted conversation between disciplines. It draws on examples from historical cases of poisoning; figurations of uncertainty and blurred boundaries in literature; and cinematic examples, from early cinema and arthouse to documentary and blockbuster. The contributions work with concepts from gender studies, new materialism, post-colonialism, deconstructivism, motif studies, and discourse analysis.

Author: Deborah Blum
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101524898
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Equal parts true crime, twentieth-century history, and science thriller, The Poisoner's Handbook is "a vicious, page-turning story that reads more like Raymond Chandler than Madame Curie." —The New York Observer “The Poisoner’s Handbook breathes deadly life into the Roaring Twenties.” —Financial Times “Reads like science fiction, complete with suspense, mystery and foolhardy guys in lab coats tipping test tubes of mysterious chemicals into their own mouths.” —NPR: What We're Reading A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office, and corruption ran rampant. However, with the appointment of chief medical examiner Charles Norris in 1918, the poison game changed forever. Together with toxicologist Alexander Gettler, the duo set the justice system on fire with their trailblazing scientific detective work, triumphing over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice. In 2014, PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE released a film based on The Poisoner's Handbook.

Author: Kathryn Harkup
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472911318
Category : Medicine in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Agatha Christie's detailed plotting is what makes her books so compelling. Christie used poison to kill her characters more often than any other murder method, with the poison itself being a central part of the novel, and her choice of deadly substances was far from random; the chemical and physiological characteristics of each poison provide vital clues to discovery of the murderer. With gunshots or stabbings the cause of death is obvious, but not so with poisons. How is it that some compounds prove so deadly, and in such tiny amounts?Christie demonstrated her extensive chemical knowledge (much of it gleaned from her working in a chemists during both world wars) in many of her novels, but this is rarely appreciated by the reader. A is for Arsenic celebrates the use of science in Christie's work. Written by Christie fan and research chemist Kathryn Harkup, each chapter takes a different novel and investigates the poison (or poisons) the murderer used. A is for Arsenic looks at why certain chemicals kill, how they interact with the body, and the feasibility of obtaining, administering and detecting these poisons, both at the time the novel was written and today. This book is published as part of the 125th anniversary celebration of Christie's birth.Fourteen novels. Fourteen poisons. Just because its fiction doesn't mean its all made-up ...

Author: Sylvia A. Pamboukian
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031160002
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison examines Christie’s female poisoners in the context of Christie’s own experience in pharmacy and of detective fiction. In doing so, it uncovers an overlooked dynamic in which female poisoners deliver well-deserved comeuppance for gendered and classed wrongdoing ordinarily accepted in everyday life. While critics have long recognized male outlaws, like Robin Hood, who use crime to oppose a corrupt system, this book contends that female outlaws – witches and poisoners – offer a similar heritage of empowered femininity. Far from cozy and formulaic, Agatha Christie’s outlaw poisoners offer readers the surprising pleasures of comeuppance, and they set the stage for contemporary detective fiction writers, more recent films depicting poisoning as empowering, and even poison gardens, which are tourist destinations that offer visitors the guilty pleasure of poison.

Author: Laura Stamm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019760403X
Category : AIDS (Disease) in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
"The Queer Biopic returns to the historical moment of the AIDS crisis and the emergence of New Queer Cinema to investigate the phenomena of queer biopic films produced during the late 1980s-early 1990s. More specifically, the book asks why queer filmmakers repeatedly produced biographical films of queer individuals living and dead throughout the years surrounding the AIDS crisis. While film critics and historian typically treat the biopic as a conservative, if not cliché, genre, queer filmmakers have frequently used the biopic to tell stories of queer lives. This project pays particular attention to the genre's queer resonances, opening up the biopic's historical connections to projects of education, public health, and social hygiene, along with the production of a shared history and national identity. Queer filmmakers' engagement with the biopic evokes the genre's history of building life through the portrayal of lives worthy of admiration and emulation, but it also points to another biopic history, that of representing lives damaged. By portraying lives damaged by inconceivable loss, queer filmmakers challenge the illusion of a coherent self presumably reinforced by the biopic genre and in doing so, their films open up the potential for new means of connection and relationality. The book features fresh readings of the cinema of Derek Jarman, John Greyson, Todd Haynes, Barbara Hammer, and Tom Kalin. By calling for a reappraisal of the queer biopic, the book also calls for a reappraisal of New Queer Cinema's legacy and its influence of contemporary queer film"--

Author: Robert Templer
Publisher: Bui Jones
ISBN: 1739424379
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Poison— invisible, unknown, hard to detect and deadly— taps into hard-wired anxieties about the risks of the world around us. From ancient times to the modern age, it has always created more fear than any other threats.In A Basilisk Glance: Poisoners from Plato to Putin, author Robert Templer takes us through the dark maze of poison. He traces its path from when Hercules dipped his arrows in the blood from the severed head of the Hydra to the use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War in 1980s, from the death of Socrates to the use of toxins as a weapon of assassination, from the mass suicide of Jonestown in 1979 to the sarin attack in the Tokyo metro system.Today, as the war in Ukraine rages, we are reminded of the use of radioactive and nerve weapons by Russian President Vladimir Putin to kill his opponents. His targets— like other victims of poison through the ages— know that they are never safe; a cup of tea, a door handle or even their own underwear might be tainted with a deadly toxin.

Author: Angela N. H. Creager
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805399128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world’s population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply’s productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the chapters in Risk on the Table zero in on key historical cases in North America and Europe that illuminate the history of food safety, highlighting the powerful tensions that exists among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers’ decisions, and cultural notions of “pure” food.

Author: Jan Büssers
Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
ISBN: 3847416464
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In numerous fields of science, work, and everyday life, humans and machines have been increasingly entangled, developing an ever-growing toolbox of interactions. These entanglements affect our daily lives and pose possibilities as well as restrictions, chances as well as challenges. The contributions of this volume tackle related issues by adopting a highly interdisciplinary perspective. How do digitalization and artificial intelligence affect gender relations? How can intersectionality be newly understood in an increasingly internationally networked world? This volume is a collection of contributions deriving from the “Interdisciplinary Conference on the Relations of Humans, Machines and Gender” which took place in Braunschweig (October 16–19, 2019). It also includes the keynotes given by Cecile Crutzen, Galit Wellner and Helen Verran.

Author: Eric Sandberg
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476645302
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the "Queens of Crime." Alongside writers like Agatha Christie, she perfected the whodunnit, but also used the genre to explore social, ethical, and emotional matters. Her characters, particularly Lord Peter Wimsey and his investigative partner Harriet Vane, struggle with the complexities of life and love in a rapidly changing world while solving some of the most intricate and complex mysteries ever offered to the reading public. Sayers was also an important theoretician of detective fiction, a religious dramatist, a public intellectual, and one of the 20th century's most important translators of Dante. While focusing on her mystery fiction, this companion offers a full view of all aspects of Sayers's career. It is an ideal introduction for readers new to Sayers's diverse and rewarding body of work, and an invaluable companion for her many fans.

Author: Susanne Lettow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000544443
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn examines the role of gender in recent debates about the nonhuman turn in the humanities, and critically explores the implications for a contemporary theory of gender and nature relations. The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume each provides theoretical reflections based on an analysis of specific naturecultural processes. They reveal how "ecologies of gender" are constructed through aesthetic, epistemological, political, technological and economic practices that shape multispecies and material interrelations as well as spatial and temporal orderings. The volume includes contributions from cultural anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, literary studies, media studies, philosophy and theatre studies. The essays are organized around four key dimensions of an "ecological" understanding of gender: "creatures", "materials", "spaces" and "temporalities". The overall aim of the volume Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn is to explore the potentialities and limitations of the nonhuman turn for a critical analysis and theory of ecologies of gender, and thereby make an original contribution to both the environmental humanities and gender studies. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students from the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities and environmental studies more broadly, as well as from gender studies and cultural theory.