I was glued to this book because it shows how a person’s mind justifies their cooperation with crime. We all have a right to a lawyer, but the book’s author gradually became a close confidante of the top Mafioso, Santo Trafficante. My work focuses on the human urge for power and status and how our verbal brain puts a nice face on our mammalian impulses. It’s all here!
Ragano tells his story without the blood and guts of most Mafia books. His co-author was the New York Times’ top mafia reporter, so the book is grounded in well-documented events. Those events were central to my childhood, which is why the book was so gripping for me. My interest in the Mafia is explained in the Epilogue of my new book, Why You’re Unhappy: Biology vs Politics.
Presents an inside account of the deaths of Jimmy Hoffa and JFK and the FBI plot to murder Castro, by a mob-affiliated attorney who spent fifteen years as one of Hoffa's personal lawyers.
I loved this book because it reads like a novel, yet its information is extremely useful in making tough decisions about medication. I’ve read a lot of books about “Big Pharma,” but this one had a behind-the-scenes look at the manufacturing and regulation of pharmaceuticals that I hadn’t heard elsewhere.
I really appreciated the fact that it wasn’t a political diatribe. It gives you a day-by-day picture of people participating in a corrupt process—not through some great evil, but by being mammals. Much of it follows the story of a particular generic drug, from research and manufacturing to the sales and marketing process. You see how people corrupt themselves in order to look good. Then you see how they finally get caught, so it feels like a detective story.
The point is not to fear any one drug but to be alert to the unreliability of regulation.
Kirkus Reviews Best Health and Science Books of 2019
Science Friday Best Books of 2019
New postscript by the author
From an award-winning journalist, an explosive narrative investigation of the generic drug boom that reveals fraud and life-threatening dangers on a global scale—The Jungle for pharmaceuticals
Many have hailed the widespread use of generic drugs as one of the most important public-health developments of the twenty-first century. Today, almost 90 percent of our pharmaceutical market is comprised of generics,…
I write about how our brain wires itself from experience, so it was fascinating to examine Steve Jobs's well-known story in that way. The book shows how each of his steps was built on the experiences that came before.
I loved the way the book manages to invoke the drama and suspense of the huge risks he took. Even though we know how the story turns out, the book really helped me understand how stressful things were while they were happening. Steve already had cancer when he developed the iPhone, but he kept pushing.
I appreciated the book’s even-handedness. It neither deifies him nor attacks him. It is rooted in interviews with many people who knew him, so you get a variety of perspectives.
THE SUNDAY TIMES AND #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - with a new foreword by Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen.
'For my money, a better book about Jobs than Walter Isaacson's biography' New Yorker
'A fascinating reinterpretation of the Steve Jobs story' Sunday Times
We all think we know who Steve Jobs was, what made him tick, and what made him succeed.
Yet the single most important question about him has never been answered.
The young, impulsive, egotistical genius was ousted in the mid-80s from the company he founded, exiled from his own kingdom and cast into the wilderness. Yet he returned…
We have been told that happiness is “normal” and unhappiness is a disorder. This “disease model of mental health” has led millions of people to believe that something is wrong with them and with “our society.”
Simple biology shows why this is wrong. The brain chemicals that make us feel good are not designed to be on all the time, and bad-feeling chemicals have an important purpose. Yet people don’t question the belief that unhappiness is a disorder because we’re told that it’s “THE Science.”
This book reveals the politics behind this belief. It shows how medicine, academia, the “helping professions,” and the media have spun “THE Science.” Happiness is a skill we must build, and this book shows you how to learn it.
