WYPR Arts

What We're Reading, Feb. 17 - 22, 2010

Published February 17, 2010 at 6:00 AM EST

Nina Totenberg passes judgment on the definitive account of Clinton vs. Starr. A true tale of Jazz Age sleuths worthy of their own CSI spin-off. And an Ahab-like obsession with whales produces a deeply satisfying natural history of these magnificent monsters.

The Death of American Virtue

Clinton vs. Starr

By Ken Gormley

Sixteen years ago, independent counsel Kenneth Starr started looking into Bill and Hillary Clinton's questionable real estate investments. Author and law professor Ken Gormley tells the story of how that investigation grew into a scandal that divided the nation and nearly unseated a president. Gormley interviewed most of the major figures and uses newly available documents to tell the story of Clinton's eventual impeachment in masterful (some might say excruciating) detail.

Hardcover, 800 pages; Crown; list price: $35.00; publication date: Feb.16

The Poisoner's Handbook

Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

By Deborah Blum

Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum traces the birth of forensic toxicology to a laboratory in New York's Bellevue Hospital in the 1920s. We follow bluff, fiercely driven chief medical examiner Charles Norris as he launches a one-man crusade against the corruption and lassitude that beset criminal investigations in the years leading up to his tenure. Together with his trusted lead toxicologist, the shy Alexander Gettler, he devises new techniques to test for the presence of once-undetectable chemicals, and ultimately makes New York City a much tougher place for would-be poisoners to get away with murder.

Hardcover, 336 pages; Penguin Press; list price: $25.95; publication date: Feb.18

The Whale

In Search of the Giants of the Sea

By Philip Hoare

Author Philip Hoare has been fascinated with whales since childhood. In The Whale, Hoare combines painstaking research with personal memoir to produce a rollicking chronicle of his Ahab-like obsession. Romp with Hoare through Herman Melville's New York, Nantucket and London as he traces the cultural and natural history of the whale from the Old Testament to movies such as Free Willy. Bored in the big city? Then hop on a 19th century whaling vessel and find out how Melville collected whale lore firsthand for his demented and delicious Moby Dick. Hoare is not a scientist, but the book is alive with sensual encyclopedic facts about the very first whale he ever encountered — Ramu, the killer whale at Windsor Safari park — along with the humpback, sperm, beaked and blue. What Hoare creates is a tough, vulnerable biography of these magnificent creatures. You'll be fascinated to hear what whales eat (um, just about everything, including whole, live humans) and how they mate (just like people — belly to belly) and raise their young.