Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

In 2003 a 19-year-old Stanford dropout named Elizabeth Holmes started a company called Theranos. She claimed she was going to change the world. Gone would be the days of needles and vials of blood being drawn from a person’s arm for Holmes had invented a new technology that allowed for a blood tests to be run on a few drops of blood pricked from a finger. Sounds great, right! Afraid of needles, have collapsing veins – no problem, all it takes is prick of your finger. Even better, this amazing machine would be relatively small and portable so it be used in say in a war zone or your local drug store, or maybe even some day in people’s homes. Not only that, but Holmes’ invention would be able to test for multiple things at once. 

It was truly an amazing idea. The problem was it wasn’t real. The technology never worked in any reliable manner. Nevertheless, over the next dozen years Holmes raised millions of dollars and got well-known business leaders and powerful politicians to back her. John Carreyrou explains how Holmes and Sunny Balwani, got away with this amazing scam for so long. And it was a scam, because again the technology never actually worked the way Holmes claimed. Investors lost their money. One man lost his life. Many people received erroneous test results. John Carreyrou explains it all in this fascinating quick read, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.

The thing that fascinated me the most about this story was how many people thought to be extremely intelligent and discerning were enthralled by Elizabeth Holmes and her claims. No doubt she is smart, and according to many, very charming. The thing that I could never get pass however, is that she is a college dropout with no education or formal training in medicine or engineering. I personally have little understanding of the science involved in testing blood. It is precisely because I know so little about the subject that I would only trust and expect someone selling a medical device to have studied medicine. Yet neither Holmes, nor Balwani, nor the famous people on the company’s board of directors had any medical or other scientific training. Still Holmes was able to convince people to invest in her company and trust her based on a little more than an idea and a promise of a better tomorrow. 

The other part of the story I found interesting was how people reacted when they realizing that Holmes wasn’t living up the claims she made about Theranos, and then how they responded to pressure from Holmes and Balwani and their team of lawyers. We would all like to believe we would have the courage to stand up and call the liars and scammers out. In Bad Blood Carreyrou shows how that is often harder to do than one might think. Employees who left Theranos were bullied. They were followed. They were threatened with lawsuits if they dared tell what they knew. Still several employees resisted. They tried to spread the word about what was really going on at the company. It was not easy but thank goodness for their courage and bravery. And thanks to Carreyrou for his reporting. Without it who knows how long this company would have continued doing what it did.

Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore

Bitterblue is a young queen of a nation called Monsea. Prior to her queenship Monsea was ruled by Bitterblue's father, an evil man known as King Leck. In this world of seven kingdoms, of which Monsea is one, some people are born with a grace. A grace is like a special gift or superpower. For instance, there is a character whose grace is the ability to look at a person and know exactly what the person needs to eat at that moment. Some characters are graced with the ability of knowing how to heal. One character, a librarian no less, is graced with the ability to remember everything he reads.

King Leck had a particularly insidious grace. He could speak and people automatically believed what he said and did whatever he told them to do. Leck was also a sadist. He used his power to control minds to not only rule over a kingdom, but to hurt his people. He did things like cut people with knives and then make the healers cure them so he could cut the people again. Leck kidnapped (especially young girls and women) and murdered people. Leck left people with injured bodies and minds that can't quite remember what is real and what isn't, what is a true memory and what is a lie. He left them with guilt over what they had been forced to do and not being able to resists his power. If this also sounds very violent for a book aimed at young adults, well it is. There isn't much violence that happens in the action of the story, but what happened in the past is constantly referenced.

Bitterblue is the third book in a set. The first two books in order of publication were Graceling and Fire. Fire is a companion to Graceling and Bitterblue is the sequal to Graceling. At the end of Graceling King Leck was killed and a 10-year-old Bitterblue became the queen. Now 18, Queen Bitterblue must figure out how to rule her very broken, very hurt kingdom.

The big problem, or set of problems, concerns how to deal with the past. Her advisors have urged a policy of simply moving forward. They want to give blanket pardons to anyone who committed crimes under Leck's rule since most of those crimes were committed while under Leck's mind control. The problem is that many people want to remember. They want to know what happened to their friends and families who disappeared under Leck's rule. They want what was stolen from them to be returned. They want to be whole again and for some that requires knowing and speaking the truth.

I love it when a book makes me think hard about something else entirely. Early on in Bitterblue I found myself thinking of truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa. Atrocities were committed and there needed to be a way where victims and victimizers (sometimes the same people in Bitterblue) needed to be able to speak the truth. Bitterblue is stuck for much of the book because she doesn't know enough about the past to help people in the present, but eventually she finds a way forward.

It is funny how books end up in one's life sometimes. A friend gave me Graceling to read because we both love romances and Graceling has a beautiful romance in between the fights for survival. That led me to this book that made be think of history and politics. What a reading world! This is why I love books.

A Conspiracy in Belgravia by Sherry Thomas

 
Charlotte is living mostly happily in exile form her family after the events from the first book. Her sister Livia is less lucky, still having to trudge through the (mating) season that is part and parcel of being an unmarried young woman in Victorian England. When not working on a way to help Livia and their other sister Bernadette, Charlotte is solving mysteries. After advertising his/her services for cases big and small, a Mrs. Finch shows up asking for Sherlock’s help in finding her first love. Sherlock immediately sees through Mrs. Finch’s ruse and recognizes her as Lady Ingram, the wife of one of Charlotte’s closest friends. Alas, Mrs. Finch/Lady Ingram is not the only one pretending to be someone she is not. 

I must admit to finding the plot slightly confusing. There was a dead body, Moriarty or at least people connected to Moriarty, and people pretending to be someone else. At various points I forgot what mystery Sherlock was trying to solve. Nevertheless, this was a fun and intriguing read. Lady Sherlock is the best Sherlock. In some renditions Sherlock is little more than a stock character with lots of annoying quirks that people put up with because he’s brilliant. Ms. Thomas makes her Holmes feel as if she could be a real person.

One of things I enjoyed most about A Conspiracy in Belgravia (and in the first book in the series, A Study in Scarlet) is how Ms. Thomas infuses the politics of being a woman in Victorian England into the story in a meaningful ways. One of those meaningful ways here takes the form of Inspector Treadles and his wife. Treadles admits that the learning Sherlock’s true gender identity was a shock. He is even more troubled when he realizes that at one time his wife had ambitions other than being a wife. He wonders why she must “desire power and unwomanly accomplishments."

It is such a treat to discover a new series and a new author. I am so glad Sherry Thomas is writing the Lady Sherlock series and that I get to read it.