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 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

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 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

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/