When I took up a reading of her first book, “The Butchering Art; Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine,” for review, I found myself unable to break away from it and completed the entire work well after midnight following a single sitting. Such is the power of Dr. Fitzharris’ narrative abilities.
As an author of exceptional skill, with an education in mathematics and engineering attained in part during his time as a cadet at West Point, and possessing a particularly quick, inventive, and curious mind. Edgar Allan Poe was in many ways an ideal personage for the age.
Quite honestly, I’m not sure what I could reasonably write following the words “books bound in human skin” that would have any greater power to induce anyone horrified at the prospect of reading a book about such a subject to overcome their aversion, or for that matter that would inspire anyone already keen to take up a such a subject even more willing to do so. Such is the division the long-whispered rumours of anthropodermic book binding has upon people.
Nevertheless, I’ll have a go.
Back in October of 2016 at the American Museum of Natural History, Jonathan Balcombe, author of “What a Fish Knows,” presented an overview of some of the material he included in his highly praised recent book about fish behavior and cognition.