Bad Blood is a Really Good Read

Bad Blood by Wall Street Journal reporter, John Carreyrou, kept me awake in the middle of the night because I simply couldn’t stop reading about Elizabeth Holmes, the ambitious young woman trying to build a biomedical firm in Silicon Valley. Though it’s non-fiction, this book reads like a page-turning novel. Holmes, the founder and creator of Theranos, a company that claimed novel blood-testing capabilities (with just a prick of the finger), also proved to be one of the country’s most charismatic liars. Carreyrou, scene by scene, builds the story of this determined young woman (a Stanford engineering department dropout after her freshman year), and illustrates how little she cared that the results of her blood tests were often radically unreliable and equally often wrong, which meant that misdiagnoses were occurring and could tragically affect people’s lives. Based on interviews with dozens of Theranos employees and many others who surrounded and knew Holmes, this book is a true work of investigative reporting. Highly recommend it.