A disturbing, painful story that smoothly combines the personal and the universal.
A disquieting book examines a dark corner of American life.
If there was any doubt that the country’s wealth gap has grown untenably wide, this book dispels it. In her debut book, McLaughlin, an award-winning journalist, turns her investigative eye on the plasma collection industry, which is astonishingly large but mostly hidden from public view. She has a personal reason for digging into it: She suffers from a rare nerve disease that requires “periodic infusions of a medicine made from human blood plasma.” The author began to wonder where the products originated and about the people who sell their plasma. She had initially expected that the sellers would be a small number of downtrodden people at the bottom of the social ladder. Instead, she found that most sellers come from the middle class. They often have jobs but struggle to make ends meet. They use the money from selling plasma to buy groceries or gas, cover bills, or repay loans. While there is no exact count of the number of sellers, a good guess is that more than 20 million people donate each year, “nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population of people 18 years or older.” As McLaughlin shows, a surprising amount of plasma is exported. In 2021, the value of American blood products sold overseas exceeded $24 billion. The pharmaceutical companies that buy the plasma understand their donor base, and they locate collection clinics in areas hit by economic decline. They often pay repeat donors more. For her research, McLaughlin interviewed scores of donors and found that many felt exhausted and ill after making a donation. The long-term health effects of multiple donations is unknown, although McLaughlin surmises that there must be some damage inflicted. “This book,” she writes, “began as a quest to find the people on whose plasma I depend…. I found a splintered society, divided by economics.” It is a distressing conclusion but an inescapable one.
A disturbing, painful story that smoothly combines the personal and the universal.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-982171-96-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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