How two giant pharmaceutical companies defrauded the public, flouted government regulations and ignored patient safety in their cutthroat competition.
In this hard-hitting exposé, investigative journalist Sharp (Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire, 2004, etc.) tells the shocking story of how Amgen and Johnson & Johnson partnered to commercially develop a seemingly miraculous anti-anemia drug that would reduce the need for blood transfusions. They conspired to push the drug through the FDA's licensing process without establishing FDA-mandated safety standards while battling ferociously between themselves for market share—secretly selling the product at steep discounts, fraudulently encouraging customers to bill Medicare at full price and using various under-the-table means to give kickbacks to doctors who prescribed the drug. Although the original license specified the drug's use for patients suffering kidney failure, J&J encouraged its use for cancer patients in therapy and started a marketing campaign to encourage doctors to raise the prescribed dosage. Mounting evidence of dangerous side-effects—blood-clotting, rampant spread of cancers and the sudden death of professional athletes who used the drug to enhance their stamina—were disregarded. Sharp artfully weaves in the riveting story of a high-flying salesman at J&J who feared he would be scapegoated for the criminal activities mandated by his bosses. Once rewarded with lavish holidays and other perks, he experienced the dark side of the American Dream when he was fired and blackballed, but he decided to fight back and become a whistle blower. The author unveils how the FDA's regulatory process has been systematically defanged beginning in the mid-1990s when direct TV advertising to the public was allowed. Since then, funding for the agency has decreased and corruption has flourished. A blockbuster of a story, especially today with Medicare potentially on the chopping block.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-525-95240-4
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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