No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, Gardner Harris
This nonfiction book is extensively documented, meticulously detailed, and utterly appalling. It’s the story of the pharmaceutical giant, which had modest beginnings as a manufacturer of bandages and cotton, products that exploded with the demand borne of the Civil War. It ventured into patent medicines, and it eventually became beloved by families everywhere with the popularity of its brand of baby powder and of Tylenol.
Unfortunately, the talc in the baby powder included bits and pieces of asbestos and was carcinogenic, both for babies and for women who used the talcum powder for personal freshness. And Tylonol’s recommended dosage is only milliliters from a level that will cause liver failure.
The worst part: the company knew of the dangers and neglected to notify its customers or to correct the problems. The FDA repeatedly tried to intervene, but J&J is immensely rich, and the FDA is chronically scanted in federal funding. The FDA was a David with a sling, attacking a Goliath that was not only a giant, but was armed with a machine gun.
Those two cases are just the tip of a dismal iceberg. The company touted its Covid-19 vaccine, for instance, as being superior to the Pfizer’s and Moderna versions because the J&J iteration required only one vaccination, while the others required two. Unfortunately, the J&J vaccine was only about 50% effective, as opposed to 90% for the competitors—a detail the company declined to acknowledge and fought to conceal. And meanwhile it maintained an army of lawyers and paid substantial bribes to doctors for their testimony that everything J&J was fine, from contaminated talcum to a dangerous analgesic to artificial hips and knees that shed particles of metal that led to operations to repair the damage, and to vaginal mesh that brought on excruciating pain…. The truly horrible participants in these were the surgeons and physicians who knew the truth but wanted the bribes.
The book is a revealing but depressing read, especially now when the FDA and the CDC are sicker than ever. Recommended.
The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed, W. Henry Sledge
When Eugene Sledge’s memoir With the Old Breed was accepted for publication, the publishers required it to be no longer than 350 pages. Since Sledge’s manuscript ran to 1100 pages, that meant some drastic cutting (his account of his service in China following V-J Day appeared posthumously as China Marine). His son Henry set out to give readers a fuller account of Eugene Sledge’s service in the Peleliu and Okinawa campaigns, as well as his own memoir of his father’s postwar life as a modest man, a professor of zoology, and, most important, as a dad.
It's a grimly realistic account of a man at war in some of the worst fighting of WWII in the horrible, stinking, death-ridden settings of two Pacific islands. Corporal Sledge lost almost all his close buddies in the conflicts. His unit, K/3/5, too often found itself outnumbered and on the bleeding edge of the front. Henry restores many of the cut sections of his father’s famous memoir, and these include shattering moments: one Marine replacement arrives and is killed by a sniper within five minutes of joining the company; another curiously picks up a Japanese rifle and fatally shoots himself; the son of a Marine whom Eugene comforted as he lay dying from his wounds gets in touch with Henry after Eugene’s death. He’s fifty-two, but he hesitantly explains that he never knew his father. He was born after his dad shipped out. But—and he begins to weep—he thanks Henry because Eugene’s story made him feel for the first time that his father was a wonderful man.
Intercut with the war story is Henry’s memoir of his father. Eugene married in 1952, and Henry came along a few years later. His father had preserved his Marine uniform and mementos of the war. As a boy, Henry asks him to talk about the war, and his father, a naturally gentle man, tells him, because he is also truthful. Was he a hero? No, Eugene says, but he knew heroes.
We glimpse Eugene cursing the memory of Douglas MacArthur, who insisted that the Marines had to take Peleliu to guard his right flank as he led the assault to re-take the Philippines. Eugene recalled bitterly that when MacArthur waded ashore in his “I have returned” moment, not under fire and surrounded by photographers, the Marines were still bogged down in the hellhole of Peleliu. Henry remembers a deeply troubled Eugene watching the news on TV during the Vietnam War, shaken and angry, muttering, “We did this twenty-five years ago so no American boys would ever have to do it again.”
It's a sobering, heart-warming, and wrenching book. If you watched The Pacific, or if you read With the Old Breed, be sure to pick this one up.
