A disturbing, painful story that smoothly combines the personal and the universal.
A disquieting book examines a dark corner of American life.
If there was any doubt that the country’s wealth gap has grown untenably wide, this book dispels it. In her debut book, McLaughlin, an award-winning journalist, turns her investigative eye on the plasma collection industry, which is astonishingly large but mostly hidden from public view. She has a personal reason for digging into it: She suffers from a rare nerve disease that requires “periodic infusions of a medicine made from human blood plasma.” The author began to wonder where the products originated and about the people who sell their plasma. She had initially expected that the sellers would be a small number of downtrodden people at the bottom of the social ladder. Instead, she found that most sellers come from the middle class. They often have jobs but struggle to make ends meet. They use the money from selling plasma to buy groceries or gas, cover bills, or repay loans. While there is no exact count of the number of sellers, a good guess is that more than 20 million people donate each year, “nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population of people 18 years or older.” As McLaughlin shows, a surprising amount of plasma is exported. In 2021, the value of American blood products sold overseas exceeded $24 billion. The pharmaceutical companies that buy the plasma understand their donor base, and they locate collection clinics in areas hit by economic decline. They often pay repeat donors more. For her research, McLaughlin interviewed scores of donors and found that many felt exhausted and ill after making a donation. The long-term health effects of multiple donations is unknown, although McLaughlin surmises that there must be some damage inflicted. “This book,” she writes, “began as a quest to find the people on whose plasma I depend…. I found a splintered society, divided by economics.” It is a distressing conclusion but an inescapable one.
A disturbing, painful story that smoothly combines the personal and the universal.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-982171-96-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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