PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMs. Conant tends to go on tangents, which distracts from an otherwise compelling narrative, and the book has rather too much medical jargon for the lay reader. But she never wavers from her central thesis: that the Bari victims were unconscionably harmed by a conspiracy of silence and obfuscation among American and British officials, all the way up to Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower ... another reminder of how cold the calculations of World War II were and of how many were sacrificed in the pursuit of a victory for which any alternative was unthinkable ... Ms. Conant ultimately shifts gears to the postwar medical research—at what is now Memorial Sloan Kettering and other institutions—that led to a generation of cancer drugs. The research saga has been covered in other works, notably Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), but she does a creditable job of pulling the highlights together and keeping her focus on the less-celebrated figures who came out of the chemical-warfare complex.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThe story, [Mukherjee] promises, is one of hubris, arrogance, paternalism, misperception, false hope and hype. Dr. Mukherjee delivers on that promise and more—at times it seems like too much more. He takes several detours into well-trod territory, such as the emergence of AIDS and its influence on patient activism, that distract from the primary story: how centuries of study have led to an era of understanding, prevention and treatment that has seen a reduction in both the incidence of cancer and the death rates from the four most common cancers ... Though Dr. Mukherjee has a storyteller\'s flair and a gift for translating complex medical concepts into simple language, he occasionally reverts to jargon so dense that the lay reader may feel overwhelmed. Yet The Emperor of All Maladies
Rose George
MixedThe Wall Street Journal\"While more a meandering survey than the comprehensive treatment that its subtitle promises, Nine Pints is a compelling chronicle, displaying an engaging prose style as well as welcome moments of righteous indignation ... Less justifiable is her disdain for the modern blood industry, which decades ago shifted from using whole blood to separating blood into components like red blood cells, plasma and platelets ... Even so, there is value in her exploration of how the modern system of blood donation got started in her home country—as well as the unusual ways it evolved elsewhere. Some of the most vital parts of Nine Pints concern the non-Western world ... Nine Pints ignores or skims over some of the more interesting trends in blood safety and supply...\
Elisabeth Rosenthal
MixedThe Wall Street JournalWhile she highlights a handful of players who have fought to bring down costs or resisted what she sees as usurious practices, her theme is not the good but the bad and the ugly, and she never strays far from condemnation. The points she makes are valuable, but her broader case might have been more persuasive with more balance and a greater willingness to acknowledge the many trade-offs that any health-care arrangement will require, even the single-payer alternative she seems to favor ... much of the time it seems as if Dr. Rosenthal sees no justification for anyone to get paid or turn a profit, which of course would sink any business ... It isn’t necessary to accept all of Dr. Rosenthal’s criticisms—or to agree with her assessment that profit is the main driver behind everything in American health care—to concede that reform is needed. Nor is it necessary to unequivocally condemn a system that has done so much for so many, whatever its flaws.
Vincent T. DeVita Jr. and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThough the parts of Dr. DeVita’s chronicle that descend into score settling dilute the otherwise powerful effect of his story—many of his targets of attack are dead now and unable to defend themselves—there is no mistaking the value of the core idea he wants to convey...
