In 1898 Katherine Adams, a respectable Manhattan widow, died after consuming a tonic prepared with bromo-seltzer that her boarder had received in the mail. The boarder—her cousin—became violently ill after sampling the same powder. Handwriting on the medicine package led detectives to Roland Molineux, a handsome ne’er-do-well who enjoyed considerable social status as the son of a Civil War hero. The young man’s trials, with their scandalous revelations, were major media events that sullied the reputation of a widely admired family.

More than a hundred years later, this case has lost none of its lurid appeal. Indeed, the New York Times says, “The book is like a fin-de-siècle version of Court TV, a riveting sequence of appalling events, weird testimony, courtroom theatrics and bungled justice,” and the Wall Street Journal calls it a “well-wrought anatomy of a murder and portrait of an age.”
In a text backed up by 27 pages of footnotes, Schechter recreates a New York City that anticipates the tabloid town of today. What he doesn’t do, deliberately, is rule on Molineux’s innocence or guilt. For that, readers will have to consult his postscript.

In Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (NYU Press), MELISSA CHECKER (Urban Studies) shows how Hyde Park went from promised land to poisoned land. She documents the community’s uphill battle to get medical screenings, clean up its soil and water, and win compensation for its financial losses. No mere bystander, the author spent a year volunteering with the local improvement committee. Writing grant proposals, running youth programs, and planning meetings, among other tasks, allowed Checker, an anthropologist, to engage in activist ethnography. The result is a case study of ecological issues in the urban arena, where lower-income populations and people of color are disproportionately affected. Hailing Polluted Promises as an outstanding work, the Association of Humanist Sociologists named the title its Best Book of 2007.

In one startling example, a septuagenarian rabbi boosts the profile of New York City’s Kabbalah Centre by linking it to Madonna, who has immersed herself in Jewish mysticism—formerly the domain of scholarly, middle-aged men. Another entrepreneurial pastor, Texas mega-church minister Joel Osteen, makes use of multimedia tie-ins to sell an extended product line. Whenever his sermons air on television, a ticker at the bottom of the screen or a graphic in the corner highlights his Web site or his book. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey rouses something close to religious fervor with her TV talk shows, which feature her own revelations, as well as celebrity interviews that the host calls “testimonials.”

“The secular has become more sacred and the sacred has become more secular,” notes Einstein, who knows whereof she writes: Before she earned her doctorate, she was a marketing executive at NBC and MTV Networks and several major advertising agencies.