Damnation Island

"A riveting character-driven dive into 19th-century New York and the extraordinary history of Blackwell's Island."
—Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of The Stowaway: A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica
On a two-mile stretch of land in New York's East River, a 19th-century horror story was unfolding . . .
Today we call it Roosevelt Island. Then, it was Blackwell's, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals. Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world ever seen, Blackwell's Island quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, "a lounging, listless madhouse."
In the first contemporary investigative account of Blackwell's, Stacy Horn tells this chilling narrative through the gripping voices of the island's inhabitants, as well as the period's officials, reformers, and journalists, including the celebrated Nellie Bly. Digging through city...