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 clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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