Gail Bell has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is Quarterly Essay 18.
The Poison Principle
Summary
A fascinating detective story and moving memoir of death and deceit. When Dr William Macbeth poisoned two of his sons in 1927, his wife and sister hid the murders in the intensely private realm of family secrets. Like the famous poisoner Dr Crippen, Macbeth behaved as if he were immune to consequences; unlike Crippen, he avoided detection and punishment...or did he? As time passed, the story of Dr William Macbeth, well-dressed poisoner, haunted and divided his descendants. Macbeth's granddaughter Gail Bell, who grew up with the story, spent 10 years reading the literature of poisoning in order to understand Macbeth's life. A chemist herself, she listened for echoes in the great cases of the 19th and 20th centuries, in myths, fiction and poison lore. This intricate story, with a moving twist at the end, is a book about family guilt and secrets, and also an exploration of the nature of death itself as Bell turns to her grandfather's poisonous predecessors, from Cleopatra, Madame Bovary and Napoleon to prolific serial killer, Harold Shipman.
©2016 Gail Bell (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Quarterly Essay 18
Summary
In the second Quarterly Essay of 2005, Gail Bell investigates Australia's depression epidemic. Why, she wonders, do well over a million Australians now take anti-depressant drugs? This is a fresh, frank and independent look at the depression culture and the move to medicalise sadness. Bell examines how the prescription culture operates, scrutinising the role of big drug companies and GPs and talking to those who take - and don't take - the new anti-depressants, from anxious students to lonely retirees. She finds that drug companies have invested billions in an effort to simplify a profoundly complex mental condition, and that along the way ordinary problems of living have been transformed into medical conditions. She also finds that we, the consumers, have been happy to get on board: The vocabulary of depression - "serotonin", "bipolar", "genetic predisposition" - rolls off our tongues as if each of us had studied it at medical school. In this free-ranging and elegant essay, Bell takes the pulse of Australia's "worried well" and looks at alternative cures for what ails us.
©2005 Gail Bell (P)2011 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.