Overview

Powerfully involving narrative and incisive detail, clarity and inherent drama: Blood offers in abundance the qualities that define the best popular science writing. Here is the sweeping story of a substance that has been feared, revered, mythologized, and used in magic and medicine from earliest times--a substance that has become the center of a huge, secretive, and often dangerous worldwide commerce. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Blood was described by judges as ""a gripping page-turner, a significant contribution to the history of medicine and technology and a cautionary tale. Meticulously reported and exhaustively documented.""

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9780688176495

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Reviews

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A gripping page-turner, a significant contribution to the history of medicine and technology and a cautionary tale. --Los Angeles Times Book Prize judges' citation [A] cast-of-thousands continent-spanning saga, complete with heroic physicians and dastardly entrepreneurs. . . . Starr's history . . . inspires a more profound appreciation for a substance we sometimes take for granted. -- Houston Chronicle Riveting. . . . A fascinating history. . . . A rich story admirably told. --Richard Bernstein, New York Times This rewarding book, filled with sharp science, has everything from a brief survey of bloodletting to an account of the massive mobilization of donated blood for the Allied invasion of Normandy. But its real subject is the postwar rise of the ?blood-services complex, ' which controls the global market for blood products. -- The New Yorker Reads like a thriller. Starr is a wonderful storyteller as well as a sober historian. -- Dallas Morning News Blood is a story of human frailty and courage, a book from which any reader could learn. -- New England Journal of Medicine Starr's lively history . . . courses with greed, altruism, and woozily vivid detail. -- Entertainment Weekly (?A? rating) Meticulously researched, elegantly told. -- Newsday Starr writes like a wildly enthusiastic high school biology teacher who arrives each day bristling with excitement, leaping about before the chalkboard, cracking jokes, and zealously banging his fist on his desk. Even the most indifferent brats pay attention, and so too will readers. . . . Starr has created what amounts to a history of the human race perceived through the filter of blood as medicalproduct. -- Village Voice Literary Supplement Blood should be included in all first- and second-year medical curricula. -- Scientific American Thoroughly researched and often shocking. -- Washington Post Book World

""Thoroughly researched and often shocking."" - Washington Post Book World

Author Information

Douglas Starr is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Codirector of the Graduate program in Science Journalism at Boston University. A former newspaper reporter and field biologist, he has written on the environment, medicine, and science for a variety of publications including Smithsonian, Audubon, and Sports Illustrated. Starr lives near Boston with his wife and two sons.

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