An unsettling, illuminating, and provocative discussion of a pressing political issue involving drug companies.
A book offers a critique of the pharmaceutical industry from a lawyer who battled it.
The currently contentious debate over health care has drawn the public’s attention to the pharmaceutical industry, a multibillion-dollar market that wields considerable influence over the political and medical communities. Sheller (Lawyering in Times of Saints and Evil Doers, 2015), an attorney with nearly a half-century of professional experience, spent a good deal of his career exposing big pharma’s more nefarious practices in court. For example, Eli Lilly marketed its “Prozac Weekly” pill by sending samples directly to candidate consumers, many of whom did not have a prescription for the drug, by accessing confidential medical information. Johnson & Johnson marketed Risperdal, a dangerous antipsychotic drug, to children with attention deficit disorder, some of whom were physically disfigured as a result. AstraZeneca illegally compensated physicians for prescribing Seroquel, another antipsychotic drug, which the company considered marketing with cartoon characters inspired by Winnie the Pooh. Time and again, Sheller uncovered a pattern of behavior that prioritized profit over consumer safety, facilitated by a collusion among politicians, regulatory agencies, medical professionals, and pharmaceutical companies, leaving the public woefully vulnerable. Sheller and Kirkpatrick’s (True Tales from the Edgar Cayce Archives, 2015, etc.) book does double duty: it’s a research study of the pharmaceutical industry’s misdeeds and a memoir recounting Sheller’s legal combat with the biggest offenders. His cases relied heavily on the testimony of whistleblowers, who are often too intimidated by the fear of reprisal to come forward. The work ends with a catalog of sensible policy fixes, which include the Food and Drug Administration’s dramatic overhaul and the establishment of independent clinical trials for experimental drugs. Despite Sheller’s many courtroom triumphs, he concludes on a less than sanguine note: “However much I would like to celebrate, I can’t claim victory. Newer and potentially more lethal pharmaceuticals enter the market each month, and the corporate titans with whom I do battle become ever more powerful and cunning.” The first chapter, which ultimately connects the voter fraud in the 2000 presidential election to a slackening of restrictions on big pharma, is far too digressive and lingers too long on the minutiae of that particular legal contest. But the remainder of the book furnishes relentlessly meticulous analysis, producing an impressive marriage of investigative journalism, legal scholarship, and public policy.
An unsettling, illuminating, and provocative discussion of a pressing political issue involving drug companies.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-615-89316-7
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Cape Cedar Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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