The Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities - An Unconventional Compendium of Health Facts and Oddities, from Asthmatic Mice to Plants that Can Ki

From the cross-dressing emperor Elagabalus of Rome, who was assassinated by his own grandmother, to the icon-worshipping fanatical Empress Irene of Byzantine, who gouged out her only son's eyes, you'll find the most malevolent malcontents who have truly survived the test of time.

For ten years, the knowledge seekers at mental_floss have been hunting and trapping the world’s rarest facts, locking them into captivating lists for the world to admire. Thanks to their tireless efforts, Mental Floss: The Book is packed with a decade’s worth of the smartest, quirkiest stories around, including:

Five Presidential Fashion Flubs
Seven Shameless Abuses of Diplomatic Immunity
Five Units of Measurement Weirder Than the Metric System
Four Toys That Have Gone to War for America
Seven Reasons Mister Rogers Was the Best Neighbor Ever
Five Things Your Body Can Do After You Die
Six of Baseball’s Strangest Trades
Four Foods People Actually Die For
Seven Things Walmart Has Banned
Four TV Shows That Changed the Course of History
Ten “Q” Words That Aren’t “Q-U” Words
Four Horrifying Parasites to Keep You Awake at Night
Eight Fake Archaeological Finds
Five Articles of Clothing That Caused Riots
Four Memorable Moments in Cross-Dressing History
Five Doomsdays We’ve Already Survived
And 124 Other Extraordinary Lists!

Since Edgar Allen Poe sees things that are not there, hears voices others cannot, and feels utterly at home in the realm of human darkness, he is the perfect detective to unravel cases of the murderous and the macabre. In "Edgar Poe and the Concord Killer" Poe's old friend, P. T. Barnum, implores the wordsmith to take his wife, Sissy, to Boston to secure an urgent medical cure (and while he is there, to please acquire the showman some particularly garish crime-scene evidence for his American Museum in Manhattan!). The crime in question is the recent butchery of a beautiful young shop girl. Once in Boston, Poe quickly surmises the sensational murder is only one in a string of inexplicable killings, centered in shadowy pool of deceit and ghoulish depravity. Poe finds himself leading a frantic investigation with the assistance of a highly unusual girl named Louisa May Alcott, whose innocence belies her own fascination with the dark side. As his wife's health falters and a city panics, Poe must see what others cannot: the invisible bonds that tie seemingly unrelated cases together---and the truth that lies behind the ghastly disguise of a serial killer. "Edgar Poe and the Concord Killer" brings to life nineteenth-century New York and Boston and Concord, a world of intellectuals, charlatans, discoverers, dupes, daguerreotypists, and amateur morticians. As Poe comes closer to unraveling the fiendish riddle, the poet must admit at last that he is up against a fellow genius---a genius not of words, but of death.  “There is some graphic violence in some scenes,” writes Harriet Klausner, “as Poe's tales are not for the faint of heart. The complexity of the murders and Poe's subsequent investigation make [this book] an entertaining historical who-done-it.” This book was originally published as "The Tell-Tale Corpse."