A damning portrait ... Comprehensively reported and researched ... Harris’ book provides a valuable history that’s not limited to Johnson & Johnson, and helps for a broader understanding of today’s health care system.
Harris, who has dug deeply into these narratives, is particularly good at showing how...corporate money can support but also corrupt science, and how corporate alliances with government can mean progress but also collusion ... At an especially salient moment, when so many regulatory protections are being dismantled, the book offers proposals.
Meticulously reported ... J&J has had few better friends than its regulator: the FDA. Harris’s condemnation of the agency is relentless; he details the ways he believes it’s been captured by the industry it should be overseeing ... Offer[s] a sweeping indictment of the status quo.
No More Tears’s account of J&J’s corporate history is as damning as it is thorough, especially the section on baby powder ... Despite the breadth of Harris’s account, the conclusions drawn and next steps he proposes at the end feel a bit rushed, like an editor had asked for some actionable items right before the book was sent to print ... The story stops just as we start to get at the problem. Beyond this throwaway 'for-profit healthcare model at large,' we don’t really get to see J&J as part of the web that is American health care ... No More Tears is a conclusive indictment of not just J&J but of the tangled industries that constitute our health care system. Harris’s exposé stops somewhere between J&J and America’s current borders, which is only abrupt if you already know more.
A just and overdue accounting ... The book is an investigative demolition job in the best tradition of muckraking exposés and should find a sizable and receptive audience at a moment when public sentiment toward our corporate health care system ranges between Ralph Nader and Luigi Mangione ... Harris could have written an entire book about the story of Baby Powder, and No More Tears would still warrant an honorable mention among notable recent narrative investigations at the intersection of corporate perfidy and public health ... Harris ably covers the famous tampering scandal of 1982, in which several people in Illinois died after consuming Tylenol deliberately contaminated with cyanide ... Given the depths of his disillusionment, Harris ends on a confused note that suggests his education remains incomplete ... Rather than extend the implications of his reporting to a system critique, Harris closes with a bizarre attempt at evenhandedness that lauds Johnson & Johnson for developing Bedaquiline, a tuberculosis drug.
[A] hard-hitting exposé ... Harris supports his takedown with a mountain of evidence and conveys his findings in scorching prose. The result is a masterpiece of muckraking.
