Peculiar Book Club Podcast

Discover the astonishing story of the world’s greatest lost treasures in this enthralling narrative by a writer with “the anecdotal flourishes of Oliver Sacks and the populist accessibility of Malcolm Gladwell.” (Entertainment Weekly)

Spanning a million years of history, the mysteries in these pages include fabled relics, legendary cities, mythical species, and undeciphered languages that have bedeviled seekers for centuries.
Perhaps the single most common theme across all of history is loss. The loss of lands, loss of sacred objects, loss of languages, of rights, of life—the past groans with disappearances of all kinds. This enthralling narrative collects the most spellbinding tales of these experiences and weaves them into a thoughtful meditation on what it all means across the sweep of human history and the scope of human lives, including:

The long-lost city of Troy
The hidden tomb of Genghis Khan
The destruction of the fabled library of Alexandria
The near-destruction of the Mona Lisa and other art
The decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
The extinction—and potential resurrection—of dodos, mammoths, and other iconic species

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Daniel Kraus returns to Peculiar Book Club to dive into a horror movie classic! His latest examines his favorite film’s importance to our history, culture, and psychology, creating a perfect blend of research and memoir in the vein of Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation. Kraus first saw George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead when he was five years old. Through watching it approximately three hundred times since (yes really), Kraus discovered the many ways the film is tied to his childhood trauma and how its influence has carried into his adulthood. He couldn’t help but wonder: Are there other admirers of the film out there who feel the same?Partially Devoured uses a frame-by-frame deep dive into Night of the Living Dead to produce a kaleidoscopic cultural investigation of the film’s importance and to examine the author’s early life of rural isolation and local violence. Join us for a live discussion with the author where we can really get into the… meat… of things.

Episode was recorded live October 22, 2026.
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Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Human History on Drugs we are reviewing the addiction movie Requiem for a Dream. Davey will also briefly discuss the TV Show Brilliant Minds and why we decided to skip it.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into what has been called one of the most realistic examples of drug addiction ever put on film. We'll discuss the themes of addiction, how it doesn't have to just be drugs, and how institutions fail our main characters.

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The true-crime saga of the intertwined lives of a Native spiritual leader and a prominent literary figure—and their shared work in their pursuit to right a tragic wrongful conviction.
Silas John Edwards—a charismatic Apache medicine man—was known as a controversial figure on Apache reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, where white authorities determined to maintain control over reservation life. When his wife, Margaret, was brutally murdered in 1933, Silas John was tried and convicted—receiving a sentence of life in prison. The key piece of evidence against Silas John was a rock found near Margaret's body, scratched with his initials, “S. J. E.".
Were the scratched initials an attempt to frame a man whose independent path was deemed troublesome? Eighteen years into Silas John’s sentence, the celebrated writer of the Perry Mason mysteries, Erle Stanley Gardner, received a desperate letter from the incarcerated medicine man. Gardner and Silas John met in prison and joined forces to reinvestigate the case. Under the auspices of Gardner’s Court of Last Resort, an organization like today’s Innocence Project that investigated cases of wrongful conviction, Gardner traveled through Arizona’s varied reservation landscapes to hunt for clues.
Together Silas John and Gardner attempted to unravel the flimsy evidence—including dubious footprint casts and questionable claims of Apache custom—to shatter the "cement silence" of prison and fight for the freedom of a historically important spiritual leader. The Case of the Autographed Corpse details a dramatic and little-known episode in American history and two men’s unwavering commitment to the truth.

In 1908, a French book, Le Corset by Ludovic O'Followell, told of the terrible suffering of women tormented by and subject to their corsets. X-ray Pictures showed injury, the text spoke of illness and disarray. It had a profound effect. But it was also… wrong. In THE BAD CORSET, Rebecca Gibson takes us on a fascinating exploration to upend O’Followell’s work. Approaching the topic from a scientific perspective, and reproducing facsimiles of the original text, with translations and annotations, tells a different story. What we see instead are the presumptions and anxieties of male medical professionals. The women who wore these perceived instruments of torture were not victims or dupes—they had agency, which after all, is what a turn of the century doctor most feared from his lady patients. Join us to talk about this feminist approach to female agency and choice, a revised look at how women shape their bodies and their lives.

Episode was recorded live September 24, 2026.
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