A harrowing, fast-paced tale of blind greed and sloppy science.
A disturbing dive into a barely regulated area of the pharmaceutical industry.
If you like fast-paced forensic thrillers à la Kathy Reichs, you’ll love this tale of death and mayhem, from the opening exhumation to the final courtroom drama. But in this story, rendered with panache by Associated Press investigative journalist Dearen, the culprit is not a fictitious evil genius but rather an ambitious and greedy entrepreneur named Barry Cadden, who ran the daily operations at New England Compounding Center, which customized “medicines for special-needs patients.” Such companies face little regulation, which can lead to tainted medications. In 2012, the NECC’s fungus-laced drugs led to the awful deaths of 100 people and made another 693 terribly ill. Cadden and his pharmacist sidekick, Glenn Chin, cut every conceivable corner in their dirty “clean rooms” and worked all the loopholes that allow compounders to sell drugs under the regulatory radar. Then they went well beyond mere loopholes. To add famed Mass General Hospital to their client list, they paid a $5,000-per-month bribe to a pharmacy staff member, who “steered orders for a variety of drugs NECC’s way.” The business was humming along until a fungus called Exserohilum rostratum contaminated 17,675 vials of a powerful pain-killing steroid shipped to 76 hospitals and clinics around the nation—and patients started dying. Dearen crafts a tight, vivid narrative based on thousands of public documents and transcripts, 150 interview sources, and reporting in eight states. He swings the spotlight among the drug makers, the victims, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s medical detectives, and the federal attorneys who finally charged Cadden and Chin with racketeering and homicide. The climax of the trial proves anticlimactic: not guilty on the more serious charges. However, if a case in Michigan “is allowed to proceed to trial, both pharmacists could be back in court facing life sentences in late 2020.”
A harrowing, fast-paced tale of blind greed and sloppy science.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08578-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A cogent “horror story” about the plot to reanimate mid-20th-century White male supremacy at the expense of abortion access.
Incisive look at the destructive path of anti-abortion ideology in the U.S.
Even though most Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose—“consistent research has shown that more than 7 in 10 Americans support legal access to abortion”—the radical right has succeeded in steadily eroding reproductive freedoms since Roe v. Wade. According to NARAL Pro-Choice America leaders Hogue and Langford, the campaign against abortion is but a means to an end for the architects of the pro-life movement. Their true aim is the uncontested dominion of White Christian men. The battle began in 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education struck down “state laws used by segregationists to maintain structural inequality in the nation’s schools.” In 1976, the IRS rescinded the tax-exempt status of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s segregationist Bob Jones University. What has followed, argue the authors convincingly, is more than a half-century of machinations designed “to halt progressive cultural change and maintain power for a privileged minority.” Anti-abortion rhetoric is just a weapon, driven by design, propaganda, disinformation, and cowed Republican politicians—hallmarks of the Trump era. Hogue and Langdon make a strong case that the rises of Trump, fake news, and science skepticism are not flukes but rather the culmination of a dogged campaign by forces still smarting from desegregation and second- and third-wave feminism. The reproductive freedom of American women is the victim of an “anti-democratic power grab on a historic scale.” The authors build a chilling case that the startling 2019 wave of abortion bans across the nation should serve as a canary in the coal mine for citizens concerned with democracy and a catalyst for bolder messaging, better strategic planning, and sustained action to combat disinformation.
A cogent “horror story” about the plot to reanimate mid-20th-century White male supremacy at the expense of abortion access.Pub Date: July 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947492-50-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Strong Arm Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2020
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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