Toxic! Killer Cures and Other Poisonings

There are some fascinating true stories here about the disastrous consequences of adding poisons like arsenic and mercury, even if unwittingly, to food stuffs, medicines and cosmetics. There are also sections about notorious poisoners: Catherine de’ Medici is said to have poisoned one of her foes with a gift of lethal chemical saturated gloves. If a young reader wanted a miscellany of interesting but only loosely connected information about poisons this book would serve. But I find it lacks a clear overall structure. It claims to link three elements all to do with ‘the extreme’: the world’s worst poisoners, exploding food and killer sweets. But if I had not read this on the back cover, I would not have immediately grasped that the material was organised in this way.

Each double spread begins with brief contextualising sentences but the authorial voice is soon lost in short bursts of information. Design can help with coherence and appeal, but this book does not seem to have benefited from new technology that makes possible clear and attractive presentation of diagrams and photographs. To me, at any rate, it has rather an old fashioned, jumbled look.