Review: Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
If your obsession with Elizabeth Homes/Theranos has been reignited due to the trial currently going on and you still haven't read this book I highly recommend you read this account.
This is an in-depth and well-laid-out account of how Theranos was started and the myriad different ways this went very wrong. the book talks about Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani's lives before the company was founded but mostly focuses on the company.
This book does one of my favorite things nonfiction can do, which is to explicitly bring in the author. We learn directly about how John Carreyrou found out about this story and how his personal involvement evolved, it was one of my favorite parts of the book.
My biggest critique of this book is that the book tells you a lot of information, but if I had not had so much outside knowledge of this case I would have really needed more synthesis of the information we received. I wanted Carreyrou to occasionally give his own analysis of the events, to add his own context in the parts of the book that were not directly about his involvement in the story.
This is an excellent and thrilling work of nonfiction. I would recommend it to true crime fans, medical folks, people interested in corruption, and just anyone who is a fan of fast-paced nonfiction. I also think this would be a good start for someone who doesn't like nonfiction.
