LYDIA KANG

Non-Fiction Books

Pseudoscience

An Amusing History of Crackpot Ideas and Why We Love Them
by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen

A rollicking visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science.

The Bermuda Triangle. Personality tests. Ghost hunting. Crop circles. Mayan Doomsday. What do all these have in common? None can quite live up the rigor of actual facts or science and yet they all attract passionate supporters anyway.

Divided into broad sections covering the easily disproved to the wildly speculative to wishful thinking and of course hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person’s future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It’s a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn’t. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain’t, but it can be explained scientifically.

From the authors of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, Pseudoscience is a wild mix of history, pop culture, and good old fashioned science–one that not just entertains, but sheds a little light on why we all love to believe in a few things we know aren’t true.

Patient Zero

From the masters of storytelling-meets-science and co-authors of Quackery, Patient Zero tells the long and fascinating history of disease outbreaks—how they start, how they spread, the science that lets us understand them, and how we race to destroy them before they destroy us.

Written in the authors’ lively and accessible style, chapters include page-turning medical stories about a particular disease or virus—smallpox, Bubonic plague, polio, HIV—that combine “Patient Zero” narratives, or the human stories behind outbreaks, with historical examinations of missteps, milestones, scientific theories, and more.

Learn the tragic stories of Patient Zeros throughout history, such as Mabalo Lokela, who contracted Ebola while on vacation in 1976, and the Lewis Baby on London’s Broad Street, the first to catch cholera in an 1854 outbreak that led to a major medical breakthrough. Interspersed are origin stories of a different sort—how a rye fungus in 1951 turned a small village in France into a phantasmagoric scene reminiscent of Burning Man. Plus the uneasy history of human autopsy, how the HIV virus has been with us for at least a century, and more.

• Winner of the 2022 Nebraska Book Award in the category of Nonfiction Popular History.
• Why We Care About Finding Patient Zero on Salon.com
• C-Span Book TV
• Learning From the World’s Worst Diseases
• WebMD: A Pandemic Pageturner
• Wall Street Journal: Holiday Gift Books
• Engadget: Hitting the Books: An Ode to the Joy of Antibiotics
• A Nebraska doctor was writing a history of nightmare pandemics. Then she lived one.
• The Lincoln Journal Star reviews Patient Zero
• The New York Times “Publishers Snap Up Corona Books, From Case Studies to Plague Poetry”
• Fine Books Magazine: Some Very Fine Books Writers