Virgil Hesse has disappeared. All that remains of him is a manuscript for a story: a locked room murder mystery. The Cosmigrove family reunites for the first time in years. The family's patriarch, the infamous Joseph Cosmigrove, is dying. He'd dedicated his life to his art -- and his death will prove to be nothing short of artistic. One morning, the family awakens to find that ...(展开全部)

Virgil Hesse has disappeared. All that remains of him is a manuscript for a story: a locked room murder mystery. The Cosmigrove family reunites for the first time in years. The family's patriarch, the infamous Joseph Cosmigrove, is dying. He'd dedicated his life to his art -- and his death will prove to be nothing short of artistic. One morning, the family awakens to find that ...(展开全部)

Nancy Tomes is Professor of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and author of The Art of Asylum-Keeping: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Origins of American Psychiatry.

AIDS. Ebola. "Killer microbes." All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to e...(展开全部)