As the long subtitle indicates, this book is about several things, but they all focus, in one way or another, on the death of Jane Lathrop Stanford on February 28, 1905, in the Moana Hotel in Honolulu. The attending physicians, the coroner’s jury, and public officials in Hawaii all concluded that Stanford, the widow of railroad baron and former California governor Leland Stanford and the cofounder of Stanford University, had been poisoned by strychnine. There had been a previous attempt at poisoning on January 14, 1905, when she was in the Stanford mansion in San Francisco. But despite the abundant physical and circumstantial evidence, Stanford University officials, led by President David Starr Jordan, insisted that hers was a natural death. As White acknowledges early on, Robert Cutler, in The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford (2003), confirmed that Stanford indeed died by strychnine poisoning.
White explains that his initial interest in...
University of California Press