It was a busy week of reading last week, but one book really stood out – and stood out so much I couldn’t save it for a non-fiction round up post as was my original plan! I have got posts lined up featuring some of the other books I read last week – including a Series I love post about Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse. Anyway, back to this week’s BotW.
Bad Blood tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos. You’ve probably heard of them – probably because you heard about what happened. Anyway, if you haven’t, here’s the summary. In the mid 2010s Holmes had positioned herself as the female Steve Jobs – a visionary college dropout whose Silicon Valley startup was promising to revolutionise medicine with their new blood testing technique. She raised billions of dollars in venture capital, was on the cover of major magazines, won awards and was invited to events at the White House. And then it all came crashing down – the tech didn’t work and never had. This is the inside story of Theranos, written by the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story after digging into the web of secrecy and deceit and facing up to some very expensive lawyers!
As usual, I’m somewhat behind the curve here – as the book came out in 2018 and I’ve only just got to it, but it absolutely blew my mind last week. Like Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill this is an incredibly readable piece of non-fiction reporting that reads a bit like a thriller – and if it was fiction you would say that it is too far fetched and that maybe the author should have reined it in a bit. But no, it all happened. My only real problem with the book is that it doesn’t really answer the question of *why* Elizabeth Holmes did what she did. It shows you how it was done, and all the ins and outs of that, but it doesn’t offer any explanation about what her plan was – and how she thought it would all play out. Also it had never occurred to me that I could call my self an inventor if I just thought of an idea and then paid people to try and make it work! I was always an arts person at school rather than a science one, so I can imagine how people like me might have been taken in by her spiel but I was surprised that she was able to get the idea past so many actual science and medical people.
The Theranos saga has also been made into a documentary by HBO, which I haven’t watched yet but really want to. It’s currently available to buy from some streaming services, but I’m hoping it will eventually turn up on a channel on my actual TV. I’ve put the trailer in the bottom for those of you who are interested. If you want to read Bad Blood, it’s available on Kindle and Kobo for £3.99 at the moment, as well as in paperback. The UK edition of the paperback looks to be with a big publisher, so I’d hope it would be easy to obtain from your Independent bookseller of choice.
Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
My thoughts were: Good Lord! These are serious people giving her company millions. Millions, and none of them asked to see the machine work. Not one.
There’s also a great podcast on the saga called the Dropout. https://abcaudio.com/podcasts/the-dropout/