An excellent account of exciting pharmaceutical triumphs.
America’s rise to pharmaceutical powerhouse.
Werth, whose books include The Billion-Dollar Molecule (1994), opens with the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which did not spare the U.S., whose doctors wrote millions of prescriptions that cured no one. He then delivers an eye-opening history of the American pharmaceutical industry featuring little-known geniuses (James Conant, Max Tishler, Selman Waksman), as well as commercial labs—“like wildcatters in the vicinity of an oil strike”—that include Merck, Squibb, and Eli Lilly. World War I produced a bonanza, as the U.S. seized American branches of Germany’s chemical industry—then the world’s best. Until the 1930s, profit leaders were newly discovered vitamins. Penicillin changed everything. Although discovered in Britain, it required a vast American industrial program to produce commercial quantities. Penicillin was not patented, so any company could make it, and profits were minimal. In any case, making money from prescription medicines was considered disreputable at the time. This changed after World War II. Government funding had given companies a massive infrastructure—mostly huge vats of bacteria already producing antibiotics besides penicillin, a “miracle drug” that enraptured the general public no less than the medical profession. This cured pharmaceutical companies of their objection to profits. They established research departments, hired chemists, patented discoveries, and recruited sales personnel to promote products to doctors. The result was more miracle drugs and profits. Werth ends with 1962 Senate hearings that revealed a great deal of shady behavior and overcharging and resulted in a strong reform bill that, after vigorous lobbying, was gutted—and then rescued by the thalidomide disaster; a morning-sickness pill popular in Europe, thalidomide produced thousands of babies with birth defects. An engrossing read, the book is occasionally interrupted by digressions, such as a long account of the spread of nuclear weapons and a chapter recounting one patient’s unusual psychiatric side effect to cortisone.
An excellent account of exciting pharmaceutical triumphs.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9781668067833
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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