Great books to read on scandals and exposes

If you enjoyed reading June's pick of the month, or the conversation we had with author Carl Elliott last week, then here are a few recommendations of other books that might tickle your tastes.

First, let's not forget the man himself: The Occasional Human Sacrifice is not Carl's first book. I'd point you particularly towards 2010’s White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, which does a great job—often grim, sometimes darkly funny—of laying out the issues in medicine. If you need disabusing of the notion that doctors are somehow a higher order of human, this will get you there fast.

If you're interested in medical scandals in general, there's no shortage of books to take you on a tour of some of the system's worst moments. Out of all the recent releases I've read, I thought Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain was the most powerful. I have a soft spot for Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, another of the great crusaders in this area, but probably the classic of the genre is Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which details the bias and the lack of care taken by medical researchers in ways that Carl's book follows up on.

If you want to take a non-medical turn coming out of this book, perhaps a good place to go is whistleblowers themselves.

The granddaddy of them all, I suppose, is All The President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But in his recent Q&A with us, Carl Elliott gave us an extra Nixon-related reading recommendation: “If you really are a Watergate fanatic, my favorite Watergate book is one that people don't really know by Bob Woodward. It’s about Alexander Butterfield, and it’s called the Last of the President's Men.” Butterfield was Nixon’s deputy assistant and the person who revealed the secret taping system that the president had installed. “The reason it's so great, so entertaining, is because of Butterfield himself, who turns out to be just an amazing. He has this very dry wit. Very dark.”

And finally, one that runs a parallel path to our June pick is Tom Mueller's Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, which came out in 2020. Like Carl's book, it uses individual case studies to look at whistleblowing history, spending plenty of time with those who exposed US government scandals and those who have, for the most part, been somewhat successful.

That's it for now. Don't forget that full club members can log in to watch the video of our Q&A with Carl.

See you next time,

Bobbie