Join the Morbidly Curious Book Club Today: themorbidlycuriousbookclub.com

Our September 2025 pick was “In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press" by Katherine Corcoran.

Early and ad-free for Patreon members! Join the Patreon today to get exclusive goodies, including the Morbidly Curious Fiction Edition book club: https://patreon.com/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink

“Regina dove in, focusing on the marginalized people who made the news at the time only in positive stories about government handouts that said nothing about the conditions in which the people lived. She interviewed the indigenous, the peasants, and the union workers, all of whom had never had a voice in the traditional press. Regina's reporting was legendary among her colleagues – so much so, that when I first heard of it, I was sure it must be an exaggeration, an assassinated journalist being lionized by her peers. In death, people become at least a small bit mythological. And the quality of journalism in the provinces was marginal at best, the standards by which they reported even more questionable.”

Former AP Mexico bureau chief Katherine Corcoran's pulsating investigation into the murder of a legendary woman journalist on the verge of exposing government corruption in Mexico. Regina Martínez was no stranger to retaliation. A journalist out of Mexico's Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Regina's stories for the magazine Proceso laid out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. She was barred from press conferences, and copies of Proceso often disappeared before they made the newsstands. In 2012, shortly after Proceso published an article on corruption and two Veracruz politicians, and the magazine went missing once again, she was bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. The message was clear: No journalist in Mexico was safe. Katherine Corcoran, then leading the Associated Press coverage of Mexico, admired Regina Martínez's work. Troubled by the news of her death, Corcoran journeyed to Veracruz to find out what had happened. Regina hadn't even written the controversial article. But did she have something else that someone didn't want published? Once there, Katherine bonded with four of Regina's grief-stricken mentees, each desperate to prove who was to blame for the death of their friend. Together they battled cover-ups, narco-officials, red tape, and threats to sift through the mess of lies-and discover what got Regina killed. A gripping look at reporters who dare to step on the deadly “third rail,” where the state and organized crime have become indistinguishable, In the Mouth of the Wolf confronts how silencing the free press threatens basic protections and rule of law across the globe.

A little about our author, Katherine Corcoran: She is a former Associated Press bureau chief for Mexico and Central America and a former codirector of Cronkite Noticias, the bilingual reporting program at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She has been an Alicia Patterson fellow, the Hewlett Fellow for Public Policy at the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, and a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow. At the AP, she led an award-winning team that broke major stories about cartel and state violence and abuse of authority in Mexico and Central America. Her columns about Mexican politics and press freedom have appeared in the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, and on Univision Online, among other publications. She is currently codirector of MasterLAB, an investigative editor training program in Mexico City.

Join us if you're curious: themorbidlycuriousbookclub.com

Early + Ad-free for Patreon members: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub

"Over time, devices migrated inside the body -- masticators gave way to dentures, glasses to contact lenses, toupees to hair transplants. Replacements became more integrated, more complex, more expensive. False teeth and prosthetic limbs can now be screwed into bones, artificial lenses surgically implanted. Of late, the buzz is for regeneration: bits and pieces grown from one's own cells. Stem cells and gene editing have landed us on the brink of a medical revolution. When it comes to regenerating entire complex body parts, however, it is a wide brink, with plenty of open terrain for hype."

Order "Replaceable You" here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/replaceable-you-adventures-in-human-anatomy-mary-roach/43877f72ed2db635?ean=9781324050629&next=t&aid=87301&listref=the-morbidly-curious-book-club-picks

Welcome to a very special BONUS episode! To celebrate the release of her new book, "Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy" I had the chance to sit down with Mary Roach and gush about her to her, but also to dive into some wonderfully weird science. (Huge thanks to W.W. Norton & Company for sending me an early copy!) We also touched on her other highly ubiquitous book, and our previous book club pick, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers STIFF, SPOOK, BONK, GULP, GRUNT, FUZZ, and PACKING FOR MARS. Her new book, REPLACEABLE YOU: Adventures in Human Anatomy, debuts in September 2025. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and her TED talk made the TED 20 Most Watched list. She has been a guest editor for Best American Science and Nature Writing, a finalist for the Royal Society's Winton Prize, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' journalism award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant. More at www.maryroach.net

About Replaceable You: The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what’s available―sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we’re attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet? In Replaceable You, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body’s failings. When and how does a person decide they’d be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina? Roach dives in with her characteristic verve and infectious wit. Her travels take her to the OR at a legendary burn unit in Boston, a “superclean” xeno-pigsty in China, and a stem cell “hair nursery” in the San Diego tech hub. She talks with researchers and surgeons, amputees and ostomates, printers of kidneys and designers of wearable organs. She spends time in a working iron lung from the 1950s, stays up all night with recovery techs as they disassemble and reassemble a tissue donor, and travels across Mongolia with the cataract surgeons of Orbis International. Irrepressible and accessible, Replaceable You immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable, and surreal quest to build a new you.

So...do you have an idea for Mary Roach's next book? Put it in the comments...

Join the Morbidly Curious Book Club Today: themorbidlycuriousbookclub.com

Our August 2025 pick was “BRIEFLY PERFECTLY HUMAN: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End" by death doula Alua Arthur.

Early and ad-free for Patreon members! Join the Patreon today to get exclusive goodies, including the Morbidly Curious Fiction Edition book club: https://patreon.com/TheMorbidlyCuriousBookClub?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink

Reminder: the May episode with Mary Roach is coming in September, and my July episode with Lindsay Fitzharris is coming sometime next year!

About the book: "For her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life. Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air—or maybe not shown up at all—and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments—when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients’ anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace. This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you. Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care—what she calls 'death embrace.' Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. 'Hold that truth in your mind,' Alua says, 'and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.'"

About the author: Alua Arthur is a New York Times bestselling author Alua Arthur is the most visible and active death doula working in America today. She is a recovering attorney and the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. Her TED Talk titled, “Why Thinking About Death Helps You Live a Better Life,” went online in July 2023 and has already received 1.5 million views. A frequent guest on TV and radio, Arthur has been featured on CBS’s The Doctors and in Disney's Limitless docu-series with Chris Hemsworth, as well as in national print media outlets, such as Vogue, InStyle, the Los Angeles Times, The Cut, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. International newspaper features on Arthur include Brazil’s Estadão and Norway’s Årets Avis. She has appeared on dozens of podcasts, and a Refinery29 video feature on Arthur and her work received ten million views across social platforms. She travels the country and world as a keynote speaker, addressing audiences of several hundred to several thousand people at medical and end-of-life conferences, universities, seminaries, senior citizens’ communities, and more.

Going with Grace link: https://goingwithgrace.com/about/

More videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPQ-UihGYQA