Peculiar Book Club Podcast

A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

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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 The Killer Whale Journals, we are reviewing a movie from our childhoods, 1993's Free Willy.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into this childhood favorite. We'll discuss the themes of the importance of family, respect and love for wha...

When Julia Mann, a bad-tempered ex-actress and professional thorn in the side of authority, runs into Natasha Mason at an AA meeting, it’s anything but a meet-cute. Julia just found a dead body in her swimming pool, and the cops say she did it (she already went to jail for murder once, so now they think she’s making a habit of it). Mason is eager to clear Julia’s name and help keep her sober, but all Julia wants is for Mason to lea...

Featuring : HANNE STRAGER, The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of OrcasORCA! It’s about time one of our Book Club shows featured these fascinating animals! When Hanne Strager, then an intrepid biology student, volunteered to be the cook on a small research vessel in Norway's Lofoten Islands, she couldn’t know the trip would launch a decades-long journey into the lives of killer whales―and an exploration of people's...

Featuring : PAUL KOUDOUNARIS, Faithful unto Death: Pet cemeteries, animal graves, and eternal devotionWhen a little dog named Cherry died in 1881, his owners arranged for a grave in a nearby gatekeeper's garden in London. At this time, the idea that a pet, even one that had lived as a family member, might be given a dignified burial was considered comical. But when other pet owners―likewise determined to memorialize their compa...

The New York Times bestselling author of They Knew, Hiding in Plain Sight, and The View from Flyover Country navigates a changing America as she and her family embark on a series of road trips, in a book that is part memoir, part history, and wholly unique.

It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland -- and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last American Road Trip is o...

Featuring : CAT BOHANNON, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human EvolutionYou loved Rachel Gross’s VAGINA OBSCURA? Of course you did. Then you MUST join us for this myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved—answering questions like what IS the female body? How did it come to be? How does this evolution still shapes all our lives today? Some fast facts to whet your appetite: Women live longe...

“Much like fine wine, battle-hardened assassins grow better with age.”

#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner
Four women assassins, senior in status—and in age—sharpen their knives for another bloody good adventure in this riotous follow-up to the New York Times bestselling sensation Killers of a Certain Age.

After more than a year of laying low, Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are called back into action. They have ...

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 The Possibility of Life, we are stepping away from the movie world and into the TV world with 3 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They are:

season 3 episode 2 "The Ensigns of Command"

season 4 episode 12 "The Wounded"

season 5 episode 2 "...

The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down
Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the Covid pandem...

Featuring:JAIME GREEN, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the CosmosOne of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? While the science behind this inquiry is fascinating, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values, our fears, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope. In The Possibility of Life, acclaimed science journalist Jaime Gre...

From the authors of Quackery, a visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science. 
From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to  straight-up 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, t...

I loved this book so much that I wrote the Wall Street Journal review for it! It’s an absolutely madcap and unexpected take on history I thought I knew… But I hadn’t yet encountered Candace Pert. This amazing scientist stood at the dawn of three revolutions: the opioid crisis, the AIDS crisis, and the mind-body movement. A troubled genius, beleaguered, beguiling, and not above bedeviling, her visionary work shaped history - for goo...

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 Invisibility, we are doing the 2020 reboot of The Invisible Man.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into this inventive horror/thriller. We'll discuss the themes of gaslighting, the technology of invisibility, and strategies for fighting...

It’s like that Monty Python Sketch… There are good reasons to know how not to be seen, and Gregory Gbur is ready to tell us all about the SCIENCE. Come now, you say, it isn’t really possible to be made invisible! Or is it? You’ll be surprised! In this book, science writer and optical physicist Gregory J. Gbur traces the science of invisibility from its sci-fi origins in the nineteenth-century writings of authors such as H. G. Wells...

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 Bite, we are doing the 1994 horror/romance film Interview with the Vampire

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into this 90's classic. We'll discuss the themes of morality, vampire nihilism, and how great Kirsten Dunst was as a child actor and To...

If you follow the Peculiar Book Club Facebook group, you’ll know Bill Schutt is EXACTLY our kind of weird. He’s a vertebrate zoologist and author of six nonfiction and fiction books, including Pump, Cannibalism, and Dark Banquet! Recently retired from his post as professor of biology, Bill’s now a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He knows ever so much about bats (our favorite night wings) and in this la...

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 Hurts So Good, we are doing the 2010 psychological thriller Black Swan.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into the world of ballet and pain. We'll discuss the themes of perfectionism, the effects on mental health from that competitive environme...

Can pain… be pleasure? I was never one to experience a runner’s high, or to enjoy ‘feeling the burn’ after a workout. But are there ways—or times—when pain provides something extra, or even extraordinary? Leigh Cowart sets out to ask and to answer this very question. Sure, we might first think of masochism as something to do with sex—but it gets out of the bedroom plenty. Cowart talks about Black Plague flagellants, ballerinas danc...