Reviews/Appearances/Press

Saturday, Sept. 20, 2014 – Book signing for Murder in the Stacks at Reader’s World, 8th Street and River Avenue, Holland, Michigan 49423. In the heart of Holland’s downtown. I will be there from 11 a.m. to about 12:30 p.m.

Saturday, Sept. 13, 2014 – Book signing for Murder in the Stacks at Barnes & Noble, 421 Arena Hub Plaza, Wilkes-Barre, PA, 18702. Starts at 2 p.m., probably will go to 3 or 3:30.

July 7, 2014 – Murder in the Stacks gets its first review, and it’s a good one. Publisher’s Weekly, the magazine of the book publishing industry, calls it, “an exemplary true crime story.”

Monday, Jan. 13, 2014: Onward State, the online Penn State news service, publishes a Q&A with me about my upcoming book on the Betsy Aardsma case, The Girl Who Was Killed in the Library: Betsy Aardsma, Penn State University, and the Murderer Who Got Away.  My book will be published by Globe Pequot Press in September 2014.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012: I talk about Centralia on the PA Live! show on WBRE-TV 28, the NBC affiliate in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. One of the station’s news reporters filmed a second interview with me after the PA Live! appearance, and that one will be on sometime this weekend on the regular newscast.

Thursday, May 17, 2012: You can hear me live tonight on the HellInACell show on  BlogTalkRadio.com from 9:30-11 p.m. Host Dean Dixon will be discussing many aspects of the Centralia mine fire with me, as well as asking a few questions on The Epidemic and my upcoming book on the Betsy Aardsma murder case at Penn State (November 2013). I assume this broadcast will be archived, at least for a time. I’ll post a link if it is.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012: Food Safety News in Seattle publishes a nice review of The Epidemic and credits me with bringing a forgotten chapter in American history back to life. They added the Ithaca typhoid epidemic to their list of the top ten food or water-related disease outbreaks in U.S. history–at #2.

Thursday, Dec. 8: I’ll be the guest speaker at the annual meeting of the History Center in Tompkins County in Ithaca, N.Y. Talking about The Epidemic, of course. Event, which is open to the public, starts at 6:30 p.m. I go on around 7.

Friday, Sept. 9: Contagion, a Steven Soderbergh film about a deadly, worldwide flu pandemic, opens in theaters. From everything I’ve read, this movie is The Epidemic on a larger scale. All-star cast, too.

Saturday, Aug. 20: Hear me read from The Epidemic at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, N.Y., starting at 3 p.m. I’ll be signing copies, too, as well as answering your questions about the 1903 typhoid epidemic that devastated Ithaca and Cornell University.

Tuesday, May 31: Tara C. Smith writes a nice review of The Epidemic for her science blog, Aetiology. Smith is an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa and studies emerging infectious diseases.

Tuesday, April 12: Doing an hourlong interview about The Epidemic with WSKG public radio in Binghamton, N.Y., for their Off the Page show. I will do the interview from WITF studios in Harrisburg.

Thursday, March 24: I will be talking about The Epidemic before the Bumblers, a men’s book club with a membership from the Harrisburg-Camp Hill-Hershey area.

Wednesday, March 23: I will be seen in the Centralia mine fire segment of Journey to the Earth’s Core at 9 p.m. on The History  Channel. My part starts about 10 minutes into the two-hour show. Producer Chris Lent of  Wall to Wall Media, Ltd., from London, interviewed me last June. The premise of the show is pretty much as the title implies–traveling in the scientific imagination down to the Earth’s core. Minus Jules Verne or Brendan Fraser, of course,  but still quite engaging.

Friday, March 11: Not every TV interview is about my books. ABC 27 in Harrisburg talked to me at length about the flooding threat to my Shipoke neighborhood. No mention of my books, of course, but an alert viewer recognized me and posted a nice comment,

Wednesday, March 9 – Jacob Schaad, Jr., mentions The Epidemic in a piece for Shore News Today in New Jersey about the early history of sanitation in the shore towns of Wildwood and Holly Beach, now part of Wildwood, and how typhoid epidemics like the one in Ithaca drove Americans to pony up money to make themselves safe..

Saturday, Feb. 26: I did a five-minute telephone interview with WHCU’s morning news show in Ithaca. I thought the interview went well, by and large. There was one odd question about whether I wrote the book out of a grudge [answer: no] toward General Public Utilities Corp., the modern-day successor to William Morris’s 1903 utility empire and the company responsible for the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Harrisburg.

Sunday, Feb. 20: A nice review of The Epidemicin the Sunday Patriot-News in Harrisburg. The link is a bit screwy. Click to open it, then click again on the review to bring it to readable size. Thanks to Lew Silverman for the review and for sending a link to the electronic edition.

Monday, Jan. 31: David speaks about The Epidemic to Dr. Leslie March’s first-period IB English class at Harrisburg Academy in Wormleysburg, PA, where his daughters attend school. It seemed to go well, and I received many good questions from the students about the writing process.

A Dutch medical blog in English, Chen Qi – The World of Micro Organism, picks up the Syracuse Post-Standard story.

Sunday, Jan. 30: Hart Seely of the Post-Standard newspaper in Syracuse, N.Y., interviews me about The Epidemic. The interview is done in Q&A format and includes two of the photographs from the book and a pensive shot of me in my study taken by my daughter, Elizabeth DeK0k.

Friday, Jan. 28: The Ithaca Journal publishes the first article about The Epidemic.

Wednesday, Jan. 26, 11 a.m.:  Harrisburg University of Science & Technology auditorium, Market and 4th Streets, downtown Harrisburg, Pa. I will be talking about my book, Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire. and showing some of my slides of the mine fire taken in the early 1980s. I will talk about how I research science topics, and close with a plug for my new book, The Epidemic: A Collision of Power, Privilege, and Public Health.

Dec. 15, 2010: Kirkus Reviews calls The Epidemic “engaging.”