Monday, March 30, 2020

Nonfiction by John Carreyrou, a graphic novel by Benjamin Reiss, and Jenny Offill's new novel

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Bradley had worked with a lot of sophisticated medical technologies in the army, so he was curious to see the Theranos system in action.  However, he was surprised to learn that Theranos wasn't planning on putting any of its devices in the Pleasanton clinic.  Instead, it had stationed two phlebotomists there to draw blood, and the samples they collected were couriered across San Francisco Bay to Palo Alto for testing.  He also noticed that the phlebotomists were drawing blood from every employee twice, once with a lancet applied to the index finger and a second time the old-fashioned way with a hypodermic needle inserted in the arm.  Why the need for venipunctures--the medical term for needle draws--if the Theranos finger-stick technology was fully developed and ready to be rolled out to consumers, he wondered.   
--From Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, a nonfiction account of the rise and fall of Theranos, by John Carreyrou (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).  Carreyrou was a member of The Wall Street Journal's investigative reporting team when he initially broke this story.  The quote above is from page 112 of the hardcover edition of the book.

When I was in Japan, everyone kept asking me why I was there.  When I came back, everyone kept asking me what I did there for so long.  Always answering the same questions gets annoying.  
--From Super Tokyoland, a graphic novel by Benjamin Reiss (Top Shelf, 2017).  The first version of the graphic novel, called Tokyoland, was published in France in 2009.  The revised and extended version, Super Tokyoland, was first published in 2015, and was translated and published in English in 2017.  The book is also available for purchase from Penguin Random House.

My brother told me once that he missed drugs because they made the world stop calling to him.  Fair enough, I said.  We were at the supermarket.  All around us things tried to announce their true nature.  But their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.  
--From Weather, a novel by Jenny Offill (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020).