Announcing June's book of the month

What does it take to blow the whistle on a scandal? Why do some people stand up when other people stay quiet? And what are the repercussions for those who push against the tide? Those are some of the big questions covered in Curious Reading Club’s pick of the month for June, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott.

In this book—which should be with club members very soon, if not already—you'll hear from the people who exposed medical scandals including the Tuskegee syphilis study, a deadly cancer trial at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and the more recent transplant disgrace at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet. You'll read about the doctors who went off the rails, how their wrongdoing got brought to light, and what happened next.

Maybe this won’t come as a surprise, but The Occasional Human Sacrifice can be a heavy read. Carl knows this from professional and personal experience: not only is he a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who's written a lot about the way academic medical research hurts vulnerable people, but he is himself somebody who blew the whistle on a tragic study at his own institution.

But here's a secret for you. It was actually reading an advance copy of this earlier in the year that convinced me to start this club. I ripped through it and desperately wanted to share its insights with more people. Why? Because while there might be darkness, I found optimism in its pages too. Even if these stories don't have happy endings, and even if they show systems at their worst, people are standing up—and we are here, reading about them, hearing them. It certainly made me ask myself if I’d ever be strong enough to take the risk to blow the whistle if the chance came to me (and, honestly, I’m still not sure I know the answer to that.)

Read it and let me know what you think, either by email or by joining our live Zoom Q&A session with the author himself.

Now, because Carl is on book tour and I'm traveling later in the month, we're going to hold that Q&A pretty early this time around, on Tuesday June 11 at 12pm Pacific/3pm Eastern. Don’t worry, I'll send links and reminders ahead of time and it will be recorded for those who can’t be there. (By the way, feel free to send me feedback about the best or worst times to hold these author sessions: I'd love to include as many folks as possible.)

In the meantime, existing members can access our Q&A session with last month's author Lauren Markham through our premium section on the website... and if you're not already signed up to get fresh books to your door every month, join the club now I'll send this amazing, astonishing book out to you immediately.

Until next time

Bobbie