Charles Graeber Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Charles Graeber
Charles Graeber was born in Iowa and has lived in Brooklyn, New York and Nantucket, Massachusetts. Before he became a journalist and author, he was a medical student and researcher and he co-wrote papers for scientific journals. As a journalist, he has written for numerous publications, including GQ, Wired, The New York Times, and Outside.

Charlie’s Edgar Award nominated book, “The Good Nurse” was adapted into a drama film produced by Netflix. He met with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, the film’s writer, and provided access to the materials that he used for the book.

Charles was also one of the producers for “Capturing the Killer Nurse”, a Netflix documentary, which was available for streaming November 11, 2022.

Charles’s work has been honored with an American Poet’s Prize (2nd), a New York Press Club prize, An Overseas Press Club award for Outstanding International Journalism, and several National Magazine Award nominations for feature writing.

His work has also been anthologized in collections like The Best American Business Writing, The Best American Crime Writing, The Best of 10 Years of National Geographic Adventure, The Best of 20 Years of Wired, The Best American Science Writing, and The Best American Magazine Writing.

Writing books is different from writing articles to a point and then they are similar. They are hard for different reasons as well. However Charles has always been writing books, and then trimming them down into magazine stories, that is what he came to realize. Articles are much too short for him to do anything but read, typically. He needs to wallow and spin and not know where he’s going for a very long time, then find his way out to a phone booth. That is a book.

“The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2013. After Charlie Cullen’s December of 2003 arrest, the registered nurse was soon dubbed “The Angel of Death” by the media. However Charlie wasn’t some mercy killer, nor was he some simple monster. He was a favorite son, beloved dad, husband, best friend, and celebrated caregiver. He was also quite possibly the most prolific serial killer in American history, having been implicated in the deaths of up to 300 patients.

Charlie’s murderous career in the world’s most trust profession spanned nine hospitals and sixteen years across Pennsylvania and New Jersey. When he was marched in from his final sentencing, in March of 2006, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, courthouse into the waiting police van, it appeared certain that the chilling secrets of his career, life, and capture would vanish along with him.

Now, in this riveting piece of investigative journalism almost ten years in the making, Charles Graeber presents the entire story for the first time. Based off hundreds of pages of previously unseen police records, wire-tap recordings, interviews, and videotapes, and some exclusive jailhouse conversations with Charlie himself and the confidential informant that helped bring him down, this weaves an urgent and horrifying story of betrayal, murder, and friendship.

Graeber’s portrait of Cullen portrays a surprisingly intelligent and complex young man whose promising career was overwhelmed by his compulsions to murder, and whose shy demeanor masked a twisted interior life hidden even to his friends and family. Were it not for the unrelenting and hardboiled work of two ex-Newark homicide detectives that raced to put the pieces together of Cullen’s own professional past, and one fellow nurse that was willing to put it all on the line, including the safety of her kids and her job, there is no telling just how many more lives could’ve been lost.

This does more than just chronicle Charlie’s deadly career and the breathless efforts to stop him; it also paints an incredibly vivid picture of madness and offers up a penetrating look inside of America’s medical system. Irresistibly paced and harrowing, this book is going to make you look at medicine, hospitals, and the people that work in them, in a totally different way.

“The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2018. An accessible and empowering story about the discoveries of the tricks that cancer uses to avoid the immune system, and the important new therapies already unleashing the immune system to fight (and beat) the disease.

Four years in the making, “The Breakthrough” is an exciting read about the discoveries that received the 2018 Nobel Prize winning discoveries in October, and an exciting and dramatic turning point in our own relationship with this disease that has defined us for too long.

For decades, scientists have been puzzled over one of medicine’s most confounding of mysteries: why doesn’t our immune system recognize and fight against cancer like it does with other diseases, like the common cold?

As it turns out, the answer to such a question can be traced back to this series of tricks which cancer’s developed to turn off the normal immune responses- tricks which scientists have just recently found and learned to beat. The result is what many are calling cancer’s “penicillin moment”, this revolutionary discovery in our own comprehension of cancer and how to beat it.

In this book, Charles guides the reader through this revolutionary scientific research bringing immunotherapy out of the realm of miraculous and into the forefront of twenty-first century medical science. While advances in the fields of cancer research and the human immune system continue to fuel this therapeutic arms race among the pharmaceutical and biotech research centers all around the world, the next step: harnessing the wealth of this new information in order to create modern and more effective patient therapies. All of which is unfolding at an unprecedented pace, quickly redefining our relationship with this all-too-human disease.

Riveting, expertly told, and groundbreaking, this is the tale of the game-changing scientific discoveries which unleash our own natural abilities to recognize and defeat cancer, as told through the experiences of some of the physicians, patients, and cancer immunotherapy researchers that are on the front lines. This is the incredible true tale of the race to locate a cure, a dispatch from the life-changing world of modern oncological science, and a brave new chapter in medical history.