Book Review: “Bad Blood”

John Carreyrou is an impressive journalist. Two of his pieces with the Wall Street Journal won Pulitzer prizes for Explanatory and Investigative Reporting in 2003 and 2016. He has written powerful investigative articles exposing business scandals, corporate medical institutions misusing tax dollars and in 2015, he starting investigating a small company called Theranos.

Theranos was founded by Elizabeth Holmes when she was 19 in 2003. She had a single goal for her company: to develop tests for illnesses only requiring a single drop of blood, rather than a whole vial drawn through an IV.

As Theranos designed and built this machine, they raised $700 million from investors. By 2013, the company was valued at $10 billion. Walgreens partnered with Theranos to have their revolutionary blood-testing machines in stores nationwide. By 2015, Theranos seemed poised to take the medical community by storm. This is when Carreyrou started to take a closer look at Holmes and her startup.

His writing on Theranos revealed the secret they were desperately trying to hide: their blood-testing machines worth billions of dollars did not work. Amid legal cases, Theranos shut down in September 2018, and Holmes and a former Theranos president were indicted on fraud charges that could result in 20 years in prison.

“Bad Blood” takes Carreyrou’s original reporting and expands it, following the company from its inception to Carreyrou’s investigation, which brought it all down. His to-the-point writing reflects his journalism background and makes a twisting story full of medical, business and legal jargon coherent.

The only problem I had with this book was its cast of characters. So many are introduced throughout the story, I had a hard time keeping track of who was who and what they did. While Carreyrou does an admirable job breaking everything down so the reader can keep up, it is still hard to keep every thread of the story in place.

Nevertheless, I still recommend “Bad Blood.” It is one of the first nonfiction books I have ever decided to read in my free time, and I enjoyed it. I had seen Theranos make the news in 2017, so it was interesting to read about events in “Bad Blood,” which had happened only months prior. The story of Theranos is still ongoing as Holmes and others await a possible conviction.

“Bad Blood” is also unique because Carreyrou is a character in the story, in addition to being its author. He covers the time he spent investigating and reporting Theranos and their faulty claims of success, as well as the aftermath of his reports (spoiler alert: Theranos was not happy with him). His personal experiences working on the Theranos story as they tried to thwart him at every turn pairs well with the overall story of an overambitious startup that managed to fool America for years.

Paige Holmes is a junior journalism major from Topeka, KS. Reading is her favorite thing to do, because it teaches one how to think, imagine and live. Paige believes there is no better way to learn something or be entertained than by reading a book. Her favorite genre of books is fantasy/thriller and her favorite book is ‘Opening Moves’ by Steven James.