Favorite Eyeopening Odd & Curious Reads
Discover your next favorite strange story with this curated list of odd and curious reads. Dive into historical mysteries, from Mike Dash's gripping Batavia's Graveyard to the haunting photographs in Wisconsin Death Trip, and explore the bizarre with Jan Bondeson's A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities. Uncover eye-opening books that blur the lines between history, biography, and the wonderfully weird.
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Wisconsin Death Trip
by Michael Lesy
A shocking portrait of a small town crumbling--socially, morally, physically and emotionally--under the impact of the great depression of the 1890s. This "cult classic" is now available again in paperback.
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A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities
by Jan Bondeson
Discusses several strange diseases, remarkable malformations, uncommon and gruesome ways of death, and unlikely feats of fasting or gluttony, which proliferated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' medical literature, and shows that sometimes these curiosities did occur
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Batavia's Graveyard
by Mike Dash
In 1628 the Dutch East India Company loaded the Batavia, the flagship of its fleet, with a king’s ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java; the ship itself was a tangible symbol of the world’s richest and most powerful monopoly. The company also sent along a new employee to guard its treasure. He was Jeronimus Corneliszoon, a disgraced and bankrupt man with great charisma and dangerously heretical ideas. With the help of a few disgruntled sailors, he hatched a plot to seize the ship and her riches. The mutiny might have succeeded, but in the dark morning hours of June 3, 1629, the Batavia smashed through a coral reef and ran aground on a small chain of islands near Australia. The captain and skipper escaped the wreck, and in a tiny lifeboat they set sail for Java—some 1,500 miles north—to summon help. More than 250 frightened survivors waded ashore, thankful to be alive. Unfortunately, Jeronimus and the mutineers had survived too, and the nightmare was only beginning.
