PositiveThe New York Times... a withering and encyclopedic indictment of a drug industry that often seems to prioritize profits over patients. Over 550 densely packed pages, Posner tells a tireless and occasionally tiring tale that reads like a pharmaceutical version of cops and robbers ... Posner blames the ensuing opioid abuse epidemic, which has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, in part on \'the addictive drugs that 150 years earlier were the core DNA of the pharmaceutical industry\'...That is ultimately a reductive argument. If Big Pharma is still addicted to the century-old idea of producing \'staggering profits from their highly addictive products,\' it’s difficult to imagine a viable rehab for the industry. Perhaps that’s why Pharma devotes so many words to industry malfeasance and only one sentence at the end to a possible \'multidisciplinary solution.\'
Steven Levy
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewIt is a largely sympathetic, and occasionally fawning, portrait of Facebook that seems at odds with the company’s recent emergence as an avatar for the risks of unchecked corporate power ... Although the book raises questions about Facebook’s serial privacy violations and handling of foreign election interference on its site, sections addressing those issues often feel pro forma or tacked on. Levy seems much more at home narrating Zuckerberg’s high-speed upward trajectory from a rule-flouting Harvard student who capitalized on other people’s ideas to the Silicon Valley mogul who muscled the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp into selling him their start-ups ... does not delve deeply into the company’s data-mining practices...Nor does the book examine the company’s outsize role in the surveillance economy ... Unfortunately, the book’s cursory explanations of Facebook’s data operations, one of the linchpins of its success, will make it difficult for readers to fully grasp the many antitrust and privacy investigations with which the tech giant is now grappling ... The story of how Facebook came to capture the attention of nearly one out of three people on earth, with profound repercussions for humanity, is truly astonishing. But Facebook tells only half of it. It is a tour de force of access journalism. It is not a tour de force of critical thinking.
