Books like The Thalidomide Catastrophe — picked by fans

In focusing on her daughter, Luise, a mother, Dorrit Cato, in this extraordinary book captures all that is going wrong and getting worse in medical care today. Very early on you know what is going to happen and feel powerless to stop it. Maybe I feel this way so much because I see it happening every day. I’ve bought lots of copies and given Dear Luise to many working in healthcare, who have found it equally raw. If you only have minimal encounters with healthcare or encounters where things have gone well, you may find this story sad but think it a rare exception. Trust me, in mental healthcare today Dear Luise is the norm, and tomorrow it will be the norm for all of health.   

Every so often, a masterpiece tumbles out of someone who has never written anything before and thinks they can’t write. Katinka Newman clearly didn’t stop to think whether she should include this trivial detail or leave in what she had just written about that person – the result is a book that hangs together perfectly. You know this is exactly what happened. You witness the extraordinary downward spiral of someone getting supposedly the best mental healthcare there is. What you don’t expect is how she escapes from near-certain death. Newman doesn’t quote any antipsychiatry people telling us how bad psychiatry is but her account of what happened to her is all the more devastating for sticking just to her story.

Adverse Reactions opens with a grim story about a medical father who has given chloramphenicol, an apparently safe drug, to his son and watches him die a slow and agonizing death. The father's efforts to make sure this cannot happen again are extraordinary. Almost single-handedly he lays the basis for the drug safety systems we now have. At the same time, the drug company that made chloramphenicol invented the playbook which means these safety systems don’t work and prescription drug-induced death may now be the commonest form of death there is.    

In The Zyprexa Papers Jim Gottstein runs two parallel stories. One is a thriller covering his efforts to get company documents from Zyprexa’s maker, Eli Lilly, that reveal its hazards and how Lilly hid those hazards, into the public domain and his subsequent trial for doing so. The other centers on the mental health patients he spends most of his time helping avoid being given drugs like this. The patients, especially Bill Bigley, are the beating heart of this book. Their stories bring home the consequences for them of the documents Gottstein took such risks to make public. This is Eric Brockovich – except that Hollywood is too scared of pharma and too dismissive of mental health patients to make this movie. You’ll just have to read the book.

I love how the stories being shared, stories of inner strength—courage—are from a variety of women. From an Indian chief’s daughter’s actions during an uprising to a doctor’s fight to keep thalidomide from being prescribed to a Quaker’s efforts for the equal treatment of blacks in schools, this well-written book is about strong women who broke through walls and refused to be imprisoned by society’s accepted norms for what a woman’s role should be. While the women featured are not current, it doesn’t make the book any less significant. What’s important are their courageous stories. Heroes are heroes whether what they did was in the past or present.

This remarkable story illustrates that if something in healthcare sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I had to stop listening to it before going to sleep because the compelling narrative was keeping me up at night.

The author seamlessly combined this compelling narrative with exceptional research behind the Food and Drug Administration, the heroine who prevented thalidomide approval in the United States, and the catastrophic effects of a pharmaceutical company using loopholes.

When I introduce measurements to my students, I talk about “an exciting adventure across centuries.” I love this book because it tells the long history of measurement, starting from prehistory and arriving at our days as if it were a true, fantastic adventure humankind has lived since the beginning of its existence.

This is not a technical book, nor a book of history, in a strict sense. It is written by a journalist as an adventure novel, telling the story of a fantastic journey across generations to build our present knowledge.

I read it as a novel, eager to discover the next adventure, always discovering players and facts I ignored. 

You can reasonably infer that a book whose title nods toward a touchstone of the French Revolution and a landmark civil rights document will provide a treasure trove of historical references. It does indeed, but it’s history as accoutrement, with characterization at the forefront even as the mystery deepens in the background and the inexorable pull of monumental events inextricably entwines the fates of our heroes and villains. Declaration is ultimately about the flawed individuals who drive, and then become caught up in, sweeping change. Also, vampires. And necromancers. Not to mention weather mages, slaves in revolt, legendary politicians, religious converts, and the undeniable pleasure of being held in the thrall of an author who reveres the power of stories and words and excels at putting them to good use.

At the celebrations on 14 July 1790 for the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, Louis XVI took an oath to work with the National Assembly as a constitutional monarch. Less than a year later, on 20 June 1791, the royal family tried to flee the Revolution. The king’s flight convinced masses of French people that he was a perjurer: the monarchy never recovered its mystique.

In contrast, his capture near the border with Luxembourg convinced the crowned heads of Europe that the royal family was in mortal danger. Ten months later France was at war with Marie-Antoinette’s native Austria, and Europe was engulfed in a generation of bloodshed. The great American historian of the Revolution, Timothy Tackett, recounts the engrossing story of the botched flight and its repercussions for a cast of unforgettable characters.    

Napoleon’s defeat led to the demobilization of thousands of soldiers and their officers, and a sudden surplus of weapons and ammunition that would be exported to feed other wars across the world, especially in the Americas. Some of these men remained adventurers, unable to settle into civilian life, and serving the cause of independence in revolutions across Central and Latin America. Others tried to establish a French way of life in the New World, among them the colonies of settlers in the American South studied by Rafe Blaufarb in this pioneering study of the Vine and Olive communities in Alabama.