Filling its pages are tales of surgeons removing their own appendixes, nuclear physicists preoccupied with blowing up the moon, and a man who couldn’t stomach food any longer—so he ate glass. And steel ball bearings. And gold. And when he was in the mood for a treat, well, cotton (soaked in orange juice of course).

Too bad it isn’t science fiction.

Boese is a collector of the absurd. He’s curator to the Museum of Hoaxes, a website which reveals the truth behind popular urban myths. It was this collection, he writes, that led to his discovery of strange scientific experiments.

Looking at this site, you’ll find seven stories relating to one of the scientists from Electrified Sheep. And Post readers should recognize this scientist too. To give you a hint, Boese reveals he never actually held a kite in a lightning storm, and he was the first person documented to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation…on a turkey.

This book is not Boese’s first dip into weird science. Five years earlier he wrote Elephants on Acid along the same premise: “Just how far would they [scientists] be willing to go … to get the answers they want?”

Like Elephants, each story is threaded to the next by a scientific theme: electricity, nuclear power, primatology, psychology, and finally, “do-it-yourselfers” (scientists that experiment on their own bodies). But this time around, Boese promises to go into more detail.

The inclusion of the psychoneurotic goats in Operation Crossroads—the name for the U.S. Navy’s nuclear weapon testing at Bikini Atoll—gives Boese an opportunity to delve deeper. Fact-driven and unsentimental, he briefly mentions the Bikini residents. “They were given a vague promise that they’d be able to return once the US government was finished. (They’re still waiting.)”

His focus then turns to goats. Oddly enough, he found information in an article published in The Saturday Evening Post in January of 1950, written by Richard Gerstell. A small paragraph in the article, “How You Can Survive an A-Bomb Blast,” provided the reason behind the presence of the goats in the Bikini tests.

While many of the experiments mentioned in Electrified Sheep are common knowledge, Boese’s fascination with obscure details makes the book frightfully interesting. It’s packed with enough material to challenge any would-be science-fiction writer, and proves truth in a lab coat is stranger than fiction.

Electrified Sheep is available from Amazon at a list price of $27.50.

Book Review: Electrified Sheep The Saturday Evening Post

In the Middle East, a bayt, literally meaning “home,” is sacred. It is, as Anthony Shadid says, “the identity that does not fade.” With these words, a journey is born.

Pulitzer-prize winner Anthony Shadid was released from captivity in Libya and decided to return to his ancestral home in Lebanon. House of Stone, his last work before his untimely death earlier this year, chronicles his journey as he rebuilt the house and paints a vivid picture of his family’s flight to America.

The memoir is filled with descriptive passages that make the readers feel like they too are part of the struggle to restore Shadid’s bayt. He introduces his family, both still living and long gone, and he introduces his town, Marjayoun, located near the Lebanon-Israel border.

As Shadid works to return his house on the hill to its former grandeur, members of his family become a part of the story, as they work and live, play and escape.

These sections about his family are the true gems of the book. They show a journey of hardship that many of our ancestors -– or maybe we ourselves –- faced, fleeing to America. These scenes bring more meaning to the house than Shadid can explain just through his experiences restoring it.

Shadid spent years in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. His work covering the Iraq War earned him two Pulitzer Prizes, and he died of an asthma attack while covering the uprisings in Syria in February.

As House of Stone is Shadid’s final work, reading this very personal tale is all the more special. I highly recommend it for people who have ever tried to discover their family roots.

House of Stone is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing at a list price of $26.

Book Review: House of Stone The Saturday Evening Post

Avry is awaiting execution when she is rescued by a band of rogues who want to take her through the mountains to heal their dying prince – whom Avry blames for starting the hunt against healers. She is quickly caught in a power struggle between the three remaining rulers of the Fifteen Kingdoms: the obsessively religious priestess, the psychotic life mage, and the dying prince – who is starting to look like the best choice to unite the plague survivors.

But there’s a catch: If Avry heals the prince of the plague, it will kill her.

Through the first-person narrative, Avry takes you on an incredible journey from the devastated kingdoms to the perilous mountains to the heart of enemy territory and she struggles to save her world and pass on her gift. Her friends – including the enigmatic and appealing Kerrick – provide laughs and love and make Avry’s journey even more enjoyable.

I have enjoyed Snyder’s writing for years, and Touch of Power doesn’t disappoint. The book is fast-paced and easy to read; I stayed up late to read it and could barely put it down. Fantasy fans will delight, and for those new to the fantasy genre, this is a great first step into a new world.

Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder is available now from MIRA at a list price of $14.95.

Book Review: Touch of Power The Saturday Evening Post

Well-regarded assistant district attorney Andy Barber, his wife Laurie, and their 14-year-old son Jacob, are living a relatively normal life in Newton, MA. When Jacob’s classmate, Ben Rifkin, is found stabbed to death in the woods, Andy gets the case and is determined to bring the killer to justice. The tables are turned however, when evidence points to Jacob as the killer and he is arrested and charged with murder.

Barber takes a forced leave of absence from his job and helps their experienced defense attorney defend their son, who neither Andy nor Laurie can believe is guilty of murder. They are prepared to go to the wall to defend and protect their only son but, in the meantime, their lives begin to unravel as they deal with it. They become pariahs in the community and prisoners in their own home. Andy and Laurie begin to question themselves and their responsibilities as parents, and questions arise relative to the criminal nature of Andy’s father and grandfather. Is there a genetic thread here that has fallen upon their son?

Landay, a former district attorney, keeps readers guessing about Jacob’s culpability and the ultimate outcome as Laurie buckles from the public accusations, her own doubts about both her son and her husband, and the pressure of the trial. All of the ingredients of a legal thriller are here, but the focus here is the unraveling of a family that has found itself embroiled in a nightmare.

Defending Jacob is available from Delacorte Press.

Book Review: Defending Jacob The Saturday Evening Post

As the title suggests, the principal draw of the book comes from the more than 350 (primarily black and white) family photos, many of which have never before been published. There are interesting and surprising pictures of the author from every stage of his life, starting with photos of him as a child dressed in girl’s clothing, moving on through his time as a wounded young soldier in WWI, stopping to explore his five years in Paris, and, finally, settling on the older, white-bearded “Papa” that most of us probably picture when we hear the name “Ernest Hemingway.”

Ernest Hemingway in 1906: a tiny hunter in the grass. (From Hemingway: A Life in Pictures.)

Aside from photos, the book also reproduces letters and other historical documents such as Hemingway’s birth certificate and his war correspondent card. One of the most revealing documents is the letter from Agnes von Kurowsky—Hemingway’s first love and the basis for the character Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms—in which she tells him, basically, that she doesn’t love him. Nearly as fascinating is a hand-corrected page of text from the manuscript of A Moveable Feast in which he expresses admiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald. These kinds of personal artifacts help humanize the writer, allowing the reader a glimpse through the “man’s man” persona that he tried so hard to cultivate.

As great as the pictures and artifacts are, the confusing structure of the book lets them down a bit. Instead of being set up chronologically straight through (from the beginning of Hemingway’s life to its end) the book is broken into eight thematically specific sections—“An American Childhood,” “Africa, the Last Frontier,” and so on. The information in each section is, indeed, presented chronologically; however, each section only contains information that is linked to that section’s theme. The divisions cause problems when, for example, we’re introduced to Hemingway’s third wife, Martha Gellhorn, on page 52 (in the section on Hemingway’s attraction to war) before we meet his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, who doesn’t pop up until page 65 (in the section about Paris). As a relative novice on the life of Hemingway, the text’s scattershot presentation of biographical details left me scratching my head (and pulling up Wikipedia) on more than one occasion.

Ernest Hemingway writing in Paris, 1944. (From Hemingway: A Life in Pictures.)

Personally, I’ve never been a big Hemingway fan; nevertheless, the informative text and candid photos in this book succeeded in making even me feel connected to the man. Learning about—and seeing—his domineering mother and Puritanical, repressed father, for example, helped me understand why he grew into the person he became. And his childhood idolization of Teddy Roosevelt certainly explains a lot about him, too! Devotees of Hemingway will undoubtedly appreciate the treasure trove of previously unseen photos in this engaging tribute to an American literary icon.

Hemingway: A Life in Pictures, a 208-page, oversized paperback book, is available now from Firefly Books.

Hemingway: A Life in Pictures The Saturday Evening Post