book review of bad blood

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Bad Blood’ Review: How One Company Scammed Silicon Valley. And How It Got Caught.

• Share full article

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

By Roger Lowenstein

• May 21, 2018

BAD BLOOD Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup By John Carreyrou 352 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

In 2015, Vice President Joe Biden visited the Newark, Calif., laboratory of a hot new start-up making medical devices: Theranos. Biden saw rows of impressive-looking equipment — the company’s supposedly game-changing device for testing blood — and offered glowing praise for “the laboratory of the future.”

The lab was a fake. The devices Biden saw weren’t close to being workable; they had been staged for the visit.

Biden was not the only one conned. In Theranos’s brief, Icarus-like existence as a Silicon Valley darling, marquee investors including Robert Kraft, Betsy DeVos and Carlos Slim shelled out $900 million. The company was the subject of adoring media profiles; it attracted a who’s who of retired politicos to its board, among them George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. It wowed an associate dean at Stanford; it persuaded Safeway and Walgreens to spend millions of dollars to set up clinics to showcase Theranos’s vaunted revolutionary technology.

And its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was feted as a biomedical version of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, a wunderkind college dropout who would make blood testing as convenient as the iPhone.

This is the story the prizewinning Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells virtually to perfection in “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” which really amounts to two books. The first is a chilling, third-person narrative of how Holmes came up with a fantastic idea that made her, for a while, the most successful woman entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. She cast a hypnotic spell on even seasoned investors, honing an irresistible pitch about a little girl who was afraid of needles and who now wanted to improve the world by providing faster, better blood tests.

Her beguiling concept was that by a simple pinprick — drawing only a drop or two of blood — Theranos could dispense with the hypodermic needle, which she likened to a gruesome medieval torture, and perform a full range of blood tests in walk-in clinics and, ultimately, people’s homes. The premise was scientifically dubious, and Theranos’s technology was either not ready, unworkable or able to perform only a fraction of the tests promised. Many of the people who showed up at clinics actually had their blood drawn from old-fashioned needles. And most of the tests were graded not by Theranos’s proprietary technology, but by routine commercially available equipment.

Despite warnings from employees that Theranos wasn’t ready to go live on human subjects — its devices were likened to an eighth-grade science project — Holmes was unwilling to disappoint investors or her commercial partners. The result was a fiasco. Samples were stored at incorrect temperatures. Patients got faulty results and were rushed to emergency rooms. People who called Theranos to complain were ignored; employees who questioned its technology, its quality control or its ethics were fired. Ultimately, nearly a million tests conducted in California and Arizona had to be voided or corrected.

The author’s description of Holmes as a manic leader who turned coolly hostile when challenged is ripe material for a psychologist; Carreyrou wisely lets the evidence speak for itself. As presented here, Holmes harbored delusions of grandeur but couldn’t cope with the messy realities of bioengineering. Swathed in her own reality distortion field, she dressed in black turtlenecks to emulate her idol Jobs and preached that the Theranos device was “the most important thing humanity has ever built.” Employees were discouraged from questioning this cultish orthodoxy by her “ruthlessness” and her “culture of fear.” Secrecy was obsessive. Labs and doors were equipped with fingerprint scanners.

The heart of the problem, Carreyrou writes, was that “Holmes and her company overpromised and then cut corners when they couldn’t deliver.” To hide those shortcuts, they lied. Theranos invented revenue estimates “from whole cloth.” It boasted of mysterious contracts with pharmaceutical companies that never seemed to be available for viewing. It spread the story that the United States Army was using its devices on the battlefield and in Afghanistan — a fabrication.

Even for a private company like Theranos, disclosure is the bedrock of American capitalism — the “disinfectant” that allows investors to gauge a company’s prospects. Based on Carreyrou’s dogged reporting, not even Enron lied so freely.

Carreyrou’s presentation has a few minor flaws. He introduces scores of characters and, after a while, it becomes hard to keep track of them. In describing these many players he sometimes relies on stereotypes. Of an employee “built like an N.F.L. lineman” the author writes, “his physique belied a sharp intellect.” Actually, it didn’t; big people can also have sharp intellects.

Such blemishes in no way detract from the power of “Bad Blood.” In the second part of the book the author compellingly relates how he got involved, following a tip from a suspicious reader. His recounting of his efforts to track down sources — many of whom were being intimidated by Theranos’s bullying lawyer, David Boies — reads like a West Coast version of “All the President’s Men.” The author is admirably frank about his craft. He feels a “familiar rush” when he hears that patient false negatives could be life threatening — i.e., that he’s onto a big story.

In the end, Carreyrou got the Boies treatment — angry (but ultimately hollow) threats of a lawsuit. Holmes also pleaded with Rupert Murdoch — the power behind The Wall Street Journal and, as it happened, her biggest investor — to kill the story. It’s a good moment in American journalism when Murdoch says he’ll leave it to the editors.

After Carreyrou’s front-page exposé was published in 2015, Theranos’s business prospects collapsed, directors resigned and the S.E.C. sued Holmes for fraud (she settled). The company also settled private suits. Federal regulators, already on the trail, found numerous violations, including sloppy lab procedures and unreliable equipment. Theranos, they determined, put patient health in “immediate jeopardy.” Several of the labs have been shuttered. Carreyrou has reported that Theranos is under criminal investigation and probably headed for liquidation.

The question of how it got so far — more than 800 employees and a paper valuation of $9 billion — will fascinate business school classes for years. The first line of defense should have been the board, and its failure was shocking. Some of the directors displayed a fawning devotion to Holmes — in effect becoming cheerleaders rather than overseers. Shultz helped his grandson land a job; when the kid reported back that the place was rotten, Grandpa didn’t believe him. There is a larger moral here: The people in the trenches know best. The V.I.P. directors were nectar for investor bees, but they had no relevant expertise.

Even outsiders could have spotted red flags, but averted their eyes as if they wanted to believe. Fishy excuses — Holmes blamed a production delay on an earthquake in Japan — were blithely accepted. When a Walgreens team visited Theranos it pointedly asked for — and was denied — permission to see the lab. A company consultant pleaded that the chain not go ahead with in-store clinics. “Someday this is going to be a black eye,” he predicted. But Walgreens was plagued by a “fear of missing out.” Like many executives, they were looking over their shoulder and not at the evidence.

Surely, no one suspected a lie that big. The fundamental premise “was to help people, and not to harm them,” Walgreens recounted, in a legal brief that sounded stunned. Yet another explanation is the gilt-edged and magical status that society confers on Silicon Valley, as a place where fantasies come true.

Roger Lowenstein, formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is the author, most recently, of “America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve.”

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Bad Blood, book review: The rise and fall of Theranos

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup • By John Carreyrou • Picador • 339 pages • ISBN: 978-1509868063 • £20

First they think you're crazy, then they fight you...and then they prosecute you for fraud because you were lying when you said you could change the world.

To be young, gifted, and blonde rarely hurt anyone trying to make their way through the world, and Elizabeth Holmes was no exception. By now, the basics of her story are fairly well-known: she dropped out of Stanford at 19 with a plan to revolutionise medical blood testing. The idea behind Theranos was transformative. Instead of drawing blood from people's veins, develop methods for testing on the much smaller volume produced by a finger prick. Less fear, less pain, and less medical knowledge needed. People would be able to do their own blood tests in their homes and have the results uploaded to their doctor for interpretation.

The fatal flaw in this plan was that medical testing isn't like software, where it's routine to handwave over the bits that don't work yet -- and anyway you're not liable because, see, it's right there in the clickwrap licence that whatever happens it's not your fault. Instead, with people's lives at stake, you've got regulators and scientists, who are used to inspecting devices closely and expect peer review. These folks lack a sense of humour about fakery.

But young, gifted, and blonde makes an impression, and the collection of names that Holmes collected as investors and board members is astonishing, though weirdly eclectic. Her board included Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and a smattering of former senators and other political bigwigs. The leaders of both the drugstore chain Walgreen's, and Safeway saw in Theranos the opportunity to reinvent their businesses at a time when new directions were needed. Rupert Murdoch invested $125 million of his own money. The famed lawyer David Boies took payment in shares to represent the company in attacking critics. On YouTube you can see former president Bill Clinton's enchantment.

SEE: Launching and building a startup: A founder's guide (free PDF)

The collapse began in late 2015, when Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou told the world that the devices did not work as advertised. Holmes, who had been giddily enjoying the awards and attention, began facing less friendly interviews. In these , she displayed all the evasiveness and aggressive refusal to answer questions of a recent Supreme Court nominee.

In Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup , Carreyrou tells the entire astounding story, based on the extensive research he did for the 30 articles his newspaper published, beginning with Holmes's personal background and ending with her settling fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner working for the leading US financial newspaper carries weight that is not easily dismissed, and despite lawsuits, threats and terrified witnesses, Carreyrou has long since been proven right. Holmes has had to pay back millions for voided medical tests and lost investments, and watch her personal net worth crash from $4.5 billion to zero. Now, Holmes and her former COO, Sunny Balwani , are facing criminal indictments for fraud. They are pleading not guilty.

One interesting note on the dynamics of being a woman in business. Carreyrou unearthed a suggestion that Holmes's natural voice is much higher than the unusually deep one sported by her public persona. Some internet commenters appear to find this offensively fake. Yet a young woman with a high voice is genuinely disadvantaged in business, and if Holmes had succeeded we'd call her 'smart'. Margaret Thatcher, who famously took voice lessons to deepen her voice and give it that authoritative ability to cut through the braying House of Commons like a buzzsaw, certainly was.

The lesson here, such as it is, should not be "See? You can't trust women entrepreneurs". Instead, it should be: no matter how charismatic the leader of the business is, and no matter how good their story, you must get appropriate experts to check out their claims. Investors were dazzled by the names on Holmes's board. That was fine in the 1980s when nascent businesses were writing hobbyist software. But today software has real consequences for safety in the physical world, and Silicon Valley investors can't go on "asking forgiveness, not permission". Due diligence has to mean more than following the person-to-person chain of trust.

RECENT AND RELATED CONTENT

AI startup People.ai gets $30 million from Andreessen Horowitz to free up workplace drudgery San Francisco-based cloud software startup People.ai is building data "pipelines" using machine learning that will automate much of the drudgery of updating contacts in systems such as Salesforce.com. CEO Oleg Rogynskyy tells ZDNet the result can be saving executives 20 percent to 40 percent of their busywork.

Startup boasts unhackable email protection for the rest of us Life was simpler when it was just criminals ripping off your data. But today it is the state-sponsored hackers that pose the biggest threat to data security. Secure Channels Inc. is a startup addressing the whole data security lifecycle, including email.

The Brexit dilemma: Will London's start-ups stay or go? The capital's tech companies are trying to plot a course that will steer them past Brexit. That will mean some difficult decisions ahead.

Alibaba wants to diversify Hong Kong and believes startups are the key Jack Ma's HK$1 billion non-profit fund is branching out to bring diversity into Hong Kong.

Microsoft buys AI startup Lobe Lobe makes a visual platform on which users can build, train and ship custom deep learning models with little to no code writing.

Read more book reviews

• Hello World, book review: Algorithms, and how to live with them
• The Death of the Gods, book review: Power in the digital age
• Artificial Unintelligence, book review: Exploring the limits of technology
• The Open Revolution, book review: Ownership in the digital age
• The 4th Industrial Revolution, book review: A curate's egg

Oura Ring 3 review: Still the best smart ring in 2024 (for now)

I've tested every apple watch model. these are my favorites, nvidia chip, gpt-5, microsoft ai devices, and google health redesign top zdnet's innovation index.

• Member Login
• Library Patron Login

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR

FREE NEWSLETTERS

Search: Title Author Article Search String:

Reviews of Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

by John Carreyrou

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• History, Current Affairs and Religion
• Contemporary
• Top 20 Best Books of 2018

Rate this book

About this Book

Book summary.

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

November 17, 2006 Tim Kemp had good news for his team. The former IBM executive was in charge of bioinformatics at Theranos, a startup with a cutting-edge blood-testing system. The company had just completed its first big live demonstration for a pharmaceutical company. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos’s twenty-two-year-old founder, had flown to Switzerland and shown off the system’s capabilities to executives at Novartis, the European drug giant. “Elizabeth called me this morning,” Kemp wrote in an email to his fifteen-person team. “She expressed her thanks and said that, ‘it was perfect!’ She specifically asked me to thank you and let you all know her appreciation. She additionally mentioned that Novartis was so impressed that they have asked for a proposal and have expressed interest in a financial arrangement for a project. We did what we came to do!” This was a pivotal moment for Theranos. The three-year-old startup had progressed ...

• "Beyond the Book" articles
• Free books to read and review (US only)
• Find books by time period, setting & theme
• Read-alike suggestions by book and author
• Book club discussions
• and much more!
• Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
• More about membership!

Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Carreyrou's work has won many accolades; his Wall Street Journal articles on Theranos won the George Polk Award for Financial Reporting, and Bad Blood was awarded the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. It also appeared on many "best of" lists for 2018. My vote can be added; I certainly found it to be one of the finest non-fiction accounts I've read, and I highly recommend it to those interested in cautionary tales about the business world or great non-fiction reads in general... continued

Full Review (825 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today .

(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs ).

Write your own review!

Beyond the Book

Immunoassay: a medical diagnostic test.

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Read-Alikes

• Genres & Themes

If you liked Bad Blood, try these:

by Jamie Ducharme

Published 2022

About this book

A propulsive, eye-opening work of reporting, chronicling the rise of Juul and the birth of a new addiction.

by Christopher Leonard

Published 2020

Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail , Christopher Leonard's Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.

Books with similar themes

Support bookbrowse.

Join our inner reading circle, go ad-free and get way more!

Find out more

BookBrowse Book Club

Members Recommend

Bad Animals by Sarah Braunstein

A sexy, propulsive novel that confronts the limits of empathy and the perils of appropriation through the eyes of a disgraced small-town librarian.

The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill

There's nothing easier to dismiss than a conspiracy theory—until it turns out to be true.

The Stone Home by Crystal Hana Kim

A moving family drama and coming-of-age story revealing a dark corner of South Korean history.

Who Said...

I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Solve this clue:

and be entered to win..

Your guide to exceptional           books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Bad Blood Review: The Biggest Scam in Silicon Valley

By Kevin Nguyen

Titled after the eleventh best song on 1989 , John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood is a scrupulously reported book about Silicon Valley hubris. You might recall Carreyrou’s reporting last year in The Wall Street Journal , when he exposed the lie behind Theranos (rhymes with “Bailamos” ), the multi-billion-dollar-valued tech startup that sought to simplify blood testing. Theranos—not to be confused with Thanatos, the god of death, or Thanos, the purple Marvel villain—raised money on a too-good-to-be-true promise of a pitch deck: a revolutionary household box that could administer a number of medical tests—all with a single prick. Turns out Theranos would involve a lot more than one prick.

The company’s CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, was a classic narcissist—an intelligent and ambitious entrepreneur who surrounded herself with mediocre yes men. She pitted engineering teams against each other, assuming competition would foster better productivity over collaboration. She was also paranoid and secretive. Holmes’s assistants would Facebook-friend employees just to report on what they were posting. Her entire M.O. could be summed up by a motivational saying inscribed on a paperweight she kept on her desk: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

The answer to that question: lie. Theranos created devices that simply did not work. So began a convoluted scheme of bait-and-switches (baits-and-switch?) with potential investors and clients to convince suckers that Theranos could deliver on the goods: broken machines and fake results. The technology might be new and shiny, but the scam was as old as time.

Bad Blood argues that Holmes was less an impressive con artist, and something more akin to a cult leader. People—employees and investors alike—were taken by Holmes’s “aura.” It’s no surprise that she deeply, deeply admired Steve Jobs. She dressed like him. Her Audi didn’t have a license plate, a nod to Jobs. After the Apple founder’s death, co-workers at Theranos noticed that Holmes was lifting management tactics from Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography. (“They were all reading the book too and could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’s career she was impersonating.”) If she wasn’t being investigated for “massive fraud,” you’d imagine Holmes’s second startup would invent technology to let her wear Jobs’s skin.

Still, Holmes isn’t the only villain. Theranos's second-in-command was Sunny Balwani, her combative and self-aggrandizing boyfriend. In fact, Balwani’s behavior ranged from petty to straight-up vindictive, even more so than Holmes’s. He harangued people about the number of hours they worked, even summoning security footage to track employees’ comings and goings. At one point, after a flurry of resignations, he and Holmes called an all-hands meeting where Balwani said that “anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should ‘get the fuck out.’ ” Then he distributed copies of noted trash book The Alchemist to everyone.

Throughout Bad Blood , a number of figures easily uncover pieces of Theranos’s sham. But in nearly every case, the skeptic is overruled by someone who is intoxicated by the company’s potential. That’s how Theranos raised $1.4 billion in capital. (High-profile suckers include: the Walmart heirs, Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch.) They also scored lucrative deals with Safeway and Walgreens. “What if the Theranos technology did turn out to be game-changing?” Carreyrou writes, detailing investors’ approach to the company. “It might spend the next decade regretting passing up on it. The fear of missing out was a powerful deterrent.” That’s right, Theranos was buoyed not by common sense, but by corporate FOMO.

Carreyrou’s reporting in Bad Blood is exhaustive, including interviews with more than 150 people—more than 60 of those being ex-Theranos employees with enough tea to fill an Olympic pool. Still, the book stumbles a bit in its third act, when Carreyrou introduces himself and how he broke the story. Since we’ve spent the last 200 pages in the story, hearing him piece it together after the fact is a bit humdrum. (Carreyrou might have two Pulitzers, but this isn’t exactly Spotlight .)

Still, these are small issues in a book that speaks volumes to tech at large. In the past two years, we’ve watched public opinion flip on Uber and Facebook, and the nerdy opulence of startups has become a frequent punchline, be it through the lampoon of HBO’s Silicon Valley or memes of thicc Mark Zuckerberg . In the same vein, Bad Blood is a satisfying read for anyone who wants a book full of salacious startupenfreude. (Who doesn’t like reading about a good old-fashioned scam?) But more vitally, the resonant moments of the book make not just Theranos out to be a fraud, but the promise of the tech industry itself. Overpromising everything to dazzle investors, abusing employees as the norm for “startup culture,” skirting laws and morality in the name of innovation—these are all features of Silicon Valley, not a bug.

20% off $250 spend w/ Wayfair coupon code

Military Members save 15% Off - Michaels coupon

Enjoy 30% Off w/ ASOS Promo Code

eBay coupon for +$5 Off sitewide

Enjoy Peacock Premium for Only $1.99/Month Instead of $5.99

$100 discount on your next Samsung purchase* in 2024

Advertise   Contact   Privacy

Browse All Reviews

New Releases

List Reviews by Rating

List Reviews by Author

List Reviews by Title

By John Carreyrou, A thrilling and sensational story of ambition, corporate fraud and deceit

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou tells the story of Theranos, a biotech startup that had a staggering rise to a close to $10 billion valuation and an even more dramatic fall.

The very short version of this review: I was really impressed by this book.

Being in the Bay Area, I’ve heard so much about this, but figured it was mostly hype. When it finally popped up on Bill Gates’s list of Best Books of 2018 a few days ago, I decided to take the plunge.

Theranos Website Screenshot

Book Summary

For the Detailed Chapter-By-Chapter Summary, click here or scroll all the way down .

Bad Blood covers the fall of Theranos, a startup that was founded by Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes when she was nineteen. It claimed to offer faster, cheaper blood tests from just a pinprick of blood ( see their demonstration on YouTube ), as opposed to traditional methods which require needles, lab equipment and technicians.

Over the course of a decade, it ballooned to a valuation of almost $10 billion, but within a few short years was defunct once it became clear their technology was not what they claimed. It’s a saga that ensnared a range of tech, legal, political and other industry leaders such as Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, and our current Secretary of Defense John Mattis.

While a number of articles have profiled the big issues — they were lying, duh — Bad Blood does a deep dive into the company’s culture and the thousand small decisions that preceded Theranos’ downfall. In also covers the war Theranos waged as the walls slowly started closing in on their fraud. Both Elizabeth and the company’s COO are currently facing serious jail time for wire fraud.

The book’s author, John Carreyrou, is the Wall Street Journal journalist who first started reporting on possible malfeasance at Theranos. He first reported in October 2015 that Theranos was secretly using traditional blood testing machines to test blood instead of their own technology.

I think Bill Gates’s description (which sold me on this book) sums it up nicely: “The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion.”

Theranos Walgreens Launch Ad

Book Review

Bad Blood was one of the quickest reads I’ve had in a while. It’s so tantalizingly full of lies and terrible decisions and secrets that it hooks you in for the same reasons you can’t help slowing down just a little when driving past the scene of an accident.

The book paints a compelling image of a girl driven by stories of her family’s past greatness and current state of embarrassment, leveraging both powerful family and personal connections to support her grandiose vision.

Lies and secrecy are used to compensate for the unfulfilled promise of the technology itself. And in the company, those who raise concerns are fired while sycophants are promoted — all of which sets up Theranos for its eventual downfall.

Some of my interest was due having familiarity with many aspects of the book (I previously lived in the city the company was based in, visited the same hangouts, I’m all too familiar with startup pitfalls and founders who think they’re the next Steve Jobs, and I worked for the firm that served as their outside corporate counsel) as a Bay Area tech person. But, I’m pretty sure the drama seeping out from these pages is lurid enough to capture most people’s attention even without all that.

Carryrou has done a commendable job of making the book immensely accessible and readible, helped along by the subject matter itself. It’s a nutty story, even for Silicon Valley standards, mostly because of how out of control things got.

While erratic founders, lack of management skills and startups lying to investors and employees is not remotely notable, Theranos’s scale and subject matter — risking people’s ability to make smart health decisions — took things to another level. Any time you throw billion dollar valuations and cancer patients into the mix, it all gets worse.

And then, by the time the book reaches the point where Carreyrou’s begins his investigation, things have gone totally off the rails, with numerous people risking a lot to help expose the company, private investigators getting called in and armies of lawyers on the march as Theranos was clearly ready to fight to the death.

I was enthralled pretty much throughout the whole book, and I was really impressed by how Carreyrou really took the time to understand the technology, the tech industry, the legal issues and everything else related to the topic. The book wasn’t just interesting, it felt very credible. As someone who routinely whines about the quality of tech and legal reporting, I’m not an easy customer in this department.

Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes

Some Small Caveats

That all said, while I clearly enjoyed the book, a quick caveat about Bad Blood I’d point out is that the book is fairly limited in scope — this is one company’s dirty, dirty laundry being aired out. It’s a takedown of two awful people and their massive egos. The schadenfreude in this one runs deep .

I also think the book goes way too easy on the other enablers, decision-makers and people who are supposed to be leaders around them. Theranos attracted top talent (and therefore big dollars) partially due to the deep industry connections and people with deep experience that it was associated with, including a few industry luminaries. The idea that this girl and her boyfriend ran circles around all of these powerless lambs struck me as trying too hard to mold one specific narrative.

Carreyrou routinely dismisses bad behavior from others at Theranos as stemming from “pressure from Elizabeth” or plain ignorance. He also notes often the many, many times people “disapproved” of various unethical practices, but seems to give them a free pass. I get that they’re not really the subject of this book, but ultimately all these people were complicit. Disapproving internally but then doing nothing about it is not good enough.

A Minor Quibble for Music/Science Lovers

Finally, as a very, very minor quibble, it bothered me when he described her natural voice as being “several octaves” above her affected speaking voice (she thinks speaking with a low voice helps her to be taken seriously or something), and that this phrase has been echoed in articles all over because of it. An octave is not some vague indicator of some type of difference in pitch – it is a specific, measurable distance and frequency away from another note. (For you science nerds, the ratio of the frequency of two notes that are one octave apart is 2:1, with the higher note having the higher frequency.)

“Several octaves” is a lot, since most people’s entire vocal range (i.e. the highest and lowest note you can reach) probably spans around two octaves unless you’ve had vocal training — Beyonce likely has a 4-octave vocal range, for example (if judged by her music). Unless Holmes has the voice of a very small chipmunk, I doubt she speaks “several octaves” higher than her affected voice.

Read It or Skip It?

I was entranced by all the drama. Judge me all you want. It’s essentially a thrilling, sensational, schadenfreude-y tale that’s quite frankly fascinating to read. (My apologies to my dog who had to keep begging me to take her to the park instead of reading.)

From the difficulties of designing the blood tests, to the many legal issues involves in various aspects of the story, I was impressed by the level of detail and how accessible Carreyrou made all of that information. It’s excellent in-depth reporting by a highly capable writer. (Plus as a blogger, I loved that Carreyrou acknowledged he was tipped off on the story by a blogger who he’d spoken to in the past.)

It is, of course, drama of the business variety, so you’ll have to decide if that interests you.

Predictably, a movie based on Bad Blood is currently in development with Jennifer Lawrence slated to play the villianous, bleached-blond, steely-eyed disgraced founder.

Is Bad Blood something you think you’d read? Please share your thoughts below if you’ve read it! See Bad Blood on Amazon .

(P.S. I’ve started making notes in Goodreads when I post a review, so feel free to follow along!)

Detailed Book Summary (Spoilers)

1. a purposeful life (elizabeth’s background), 2. the gluebot (the inital prototypes), 3. apple envy (holmes's idolization of apple and jobs), 4. goodbye east paly (therano's move to central palo alto), 5. the childhood neighbor (fuisz's patent), 6. sunny (elizabeth's boyfriend), 7. dr. j (theranos's walgreens partnership), 8. the minilab (development of theranos's new device), 9. the wellness play (theranos's safeway partnership), 10. “who is ltc shoemaker” (theranos's military contract), 11. lighting a fuisz (the fuisz patent case begins), 12. ian gibbons (the fuisz patent case: a missing witness), 13. chiat\day (website and ad launch), 14. going live (walgreens launch lead-up), 15. unicorn (more funding), 16. the grandson (tyler schultz, whistleblower), 17. fame (media attention), 18. the hippocratic oath (theranos skeptics), 19. the tip (carreyrou's involvement), 20. the ambush (tyler vs. theranos's lawyers), 21. trade secrets (theranos on the attack), 22. la mattanza (waiting to publish), 23. damage control (publication and post-publication), 24. the empress has no clothes (theranos shut-down).

If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2 , $3 , or $5 ) or joining the Patreon !

Share this post

The Heiress

Fourth Wing

Funny Story

2024’s Best Book Club Books (New & Anticipated)

Best Cozy Mystery Books of 2024

Bookshelf: Development Diary

Best Rom-Com, Beach Reads & Contemporary Romance Books

2024’s Best Rom Com & Romance Books (New & Anticipated)

24 comments

Share your thoughts cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

This story is really crazy its good those two are going to jail I hope they get sentenced to a long time

Haha, I totally agree. Thanks for reading!

I’m definitely intrigued by this! I’m not in the US, so I’m not familiar with it, so I’d be interested to read! Great review!

Thank you! It’s kind of nuts all this actually happened — thanks for dropping by! Hope you like it if you get a chance to read it!

I’m just reading the same book. It’s like a thriller based on the real story! Once I complete reading the book, I would write a review to recommend this one strongly

That’s such an apt way to describe it, I totally agree! Glad to hear others are enjoying it too! Thanks for your thoughts!

This is a non-fiction worth looking into.

Thanks for reading! Hope you like it if you get a chance to read it! :)

I heard about this on one of Book Riot’s podcasts & was immediately intrigued. I’m even more so, given your review. I don’t remember hearing anything about this happening, so I’m so curious to know how she got as far as she did! (& I get your annoyance with the octave thing. I have had to tell a few students with whom I work that they cannot casually use the word “exponentially” when discussing things like statistics or percentages because that word actually means something. I’m surprised the editor didn’t pick up on “octaves.”)

Haha, I think people tend to use “exponentially” to describe any sort of greater than linear growth and it annoys me too!

And yes the book does a good job of covering how she got away with it all (the short answer is a combination of smarts, family background, connections and charisma — but the longer answer is much more interesting)

What a terrific review. Very thorough and thoughtful. Thanks for that. I lived in Silicon Valley for a lot of years and worked in the tech industry, but was gone before all this happened. Still, I think I would enjoy reading this.

Hi Rosi, thank you so much! I’m very curious what you’d think about it since you have some experience in the area as well. I wonder if you think something similar could have happened in Silicon Valley in earlier years — thank you for your thoughts!

I’m really intrigued by this compelling review. I remembered reading about Elizabeth Holmes on a business magazine when she first came up with the company. I hope I can get a hold of this book. It’s been so long since I last heard about her. Fascinating downfall, I wonder where she’s going to go from here.

Thanks Theresa! Yeah, I remember seeing stuff praising her, and then VERY quickly everything fell apart for them — it looks like she was trying to move past it all and start a new startup but if she ends up in jail for long time, that’s probably not going to happen…

Cool that you were impressed with this book! Great that it was so compelling and sounds intriguing. Great review!

Thank you! Thanks for reading :)

Wow! I love nonfiction and I’ve never heard of this book. Thanks for putting it on my radar! Adding to my TBR

Oh yay! Glad to be able to introduce you to this book! Thanks for letting me know and happy reading if you get a chance to check it out! :)

Nice to see the use of the word schadenfreude.

haha thank you :D

This looks really great! I’ve never read books on scandals in the tech industry, and it sounds like it is well-written, so I must read it one day. And the film too if it happens, and as much as I love J-Law, I’d love to see someone else star in it too. Disapproving internally but then doing nothing about it is not good enough. – agreed. Enablers are enablers. It takes a bystander to perpetuate the crimes of a perpetrator at the end of the day.

I just picked this up at the store! I’ll def be cracking it open tonight

I work in biotech in the Bay Area, so I also had an extra interest in this, having followed the story in industry journals as it unfolded. Like you though, I think it’s such an engaging, well told story that anyone could enjoy it. And it did seem like the author had really done his research in terms of writing about the tech.

Yeah, I always feel like a lot of articles written by “tech journalists” (who often have no experience in tech) lack some basic understandings about how the industry works and what influences/motivates people who work in it, and I didn’t get that feeling with this book at all. Thanks for your thoughts!

Tufts Boston Insight

Thoughts on the book “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup”

I began to read more than usual because of social distancing, going through the list of books I had been planning to read for a while. One of the books that was recommended by a friend was “ Bad Blood – Secrets and Lies of a Silicon Valley Startup ” by John Carreyrou [1], based on the rise and fall of the blood-testing company, Theranos. I was especially interested in it given its relevance to the biotech industry and on recently finishing the book, I realized GSBS students might also find it interesting and thought of sharing a little bit about it. While there are plenty of resources out there that help you understand how to search for a job, determine if it is a good fit and notice red flags, this book paints a picture of life in the biotech industry, both as an entrepreneur and as an employee. I think students interested in careers in industry, entrepreneurship, venture capital, or science policy will gain some perspectives from reading this book. For instance, the book portrays the harsh reality of working in industry when a team of engineers were laid off because the research was headed in a new direction and they were not needed there anymore.

In January 2003, a 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos with the vision of enabling multiple diagnostics tests to be run from a small volume of blood obtained from a finger-prick rather than the traditional venous blood draw, using the company’s small, portable, automated devices. In October 2015, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, published an article [2] revealing that the company has been misleading investors and consumers, that the blood tests analyzed by Theranos devices were inaccurate and unreliable, and that a lot of the tests were actually performed by third-party commercial analyzers. Expanding the article into a book, Carreyrou walks us through how the company was formed, how it grew to become one worth over $9 billion, and finally, how it dissolved in September 2018 [1]. It is common knowledge that most, if not all, companies in Silicon Valley have skeletons in their closets that make headlines when they are revealed. However, fraud and irresponsibility by a health technology company like Theranos, and at such a massive scale at that, is even more dangerous considering the direct harm to patients’ lives. It is shocking that a company could get so far with technology that never performed as promised, and Carreyrou lays out the various scenarios and circumstances that contributed to it.

This book exemplifies the importance of validated and peer-reviewed data, the need for rigorous testing and quality-control checks, and the need for adhering to regulations – things we already know and are trained to practice. The book also highlights the need for communication within and between different departments in a company, so employees are aware of what stage of development the product is in, identify what exactly is holding up progress and work together to solve the problem. This lack of communication and the unusually high level of secrecy was frustrating to the employees at Theranos [1]. It is therefore important to find a balance between protecting proprietary information and facilitating communication to ensure highest productivity. Besides the need for effective communication between employees, the book also shows how there is a need for open, honest communication and understanding between the employees directly involved in developing the product and higher-level management. Without it, as a leader, you risk facing the dangers of being surrounded by yes-men – a false sense of security that you are doing things right, that the technology is working perfectly, experiments are returning expected and reliable results, and experiments that are not actually feasible can be done – hence wasting both time and money. You do not improve because you do not know where improvements are needed. However, at Theranos, the yes-men were not the only ones contributing to this culture. Holmes was not only a bad listener; she seemed to consider anyone who challenged her as disloyal [1]. She was surrounded by yes-men because she did not foster an environment that welcomed ideas, suggestions, and opinions opposite her own. Employees did not come forward with concerns because they did not want to get fired. This may be especially true of employees with H1-B or other work visas who have much more to lose, considering how their ability to stay in the country is tied to their employment. Abuse of H1-B visa workers is not unheard of; a recent example is Cloudwick Technologies Inc., based in Newark, California, paying their H1-B employees a much lower salary than what was agreed upon, and making illegal deductions from their salaries.

A negative (and savage!) review on the Glassdoor website (a website where employees can leave information about a company they work or worked in, such as CEO approval ratings, company reviews, salary reports) mentioned in the book prompted me to look at what else the ex-employees of the company had to say. Many of the reviews for Theranos are very detailed, with some ex-employees especially taking the time and effort to explain the “Pros” and “Cons” of working there. The most common “pro” mentioned was free food and snacks – something we, as grad students, can easily relate to. The “Cons” part of the negative reviews is where things got interesting. You could get an insight into how the employees felt and how they were treated. Most of them were overworked and underappreciated. It may be typical of employees to put in extra hours or feel like they have no work-life balance at a start-up firm, but at Theranos, they would not only track the number of hours the employees would spend at work, but would also monitor their social media activity [1]. The employees’ dedication was measured by how long they stayed at work and whether they would come in during the weekends. I imagine such a working environment would be suffocating and counterproductive, and it was no surprise that the employee turnover was high. What you can also glean from the reviews is the shattered hopes and dreams of the employees who were inspired by Holmes’s visions and dedicated their time to actualize it. As scientists, we all hope to contribute to making this world a better place. On top of not being able to do that at Theranos, they also feared that their time in the company will work against them in future applications. The book also mentioned how the HR department would post fake positive reviews on Glassdoor, and some of the reviews did spin the “cons” in a way to show Theranos in a positive light. For example, one of the reviews listed the cons as “truths” with statements like, “If you are unable to work in a highly self-directed environment where you are counted upon to create clarity from ambiguity, you will not be successful at Theranos.” This reminded me of reading about people answering the common interview question “What is your biggest weakness?” with “I work too hard.”

All things considered, Theranos did not really ruin the prospects of a biotech-startup in Silicon Valley. As a couple of articles in Wired mentioned, investors may be more skeptical now and that may actually be better. The increased scrutiny will hopefully mean rigorously tested data and more valid claims. Carreyrou points out how tech companies usually exaggerate about how their devices perform, but the same cannot be done with a medical device. No one ever died from a buggy Candy Crush app, but a misdiagnosis can be potentially fatal.

It is also interesting how Elizabeth Holmes and her downfall (from a net worth of $4.5 billion to zero) is discussed by the public. After she and her company were exposed for fraudulent practices, the focus skewed towards her appearance rather than her transgressions. They talked about how her unblinking stare (described as a “hypnotic” gaze in the book) is “ sociopathic ”, how she is not naturally blond, how her makeup is weird, and her deep, baritone voice is fake. Also, concerns about Theranos’ technology and the company’s practice were brought forward to some highly intelligent and experienced investors. Granted, they were not experts in the field of medical technology, but it would not be difficult to get an expert’s opinion and some of them were indeed alerted about Theranos by experts. If they genuinely did not have the power, even as a member of the company’s board of directors, to do anything about Holmes, why continue to be investors and not step down? Were they all simply manipulated and “bewitched” [1] by Holmes’s charm?

People have lots of ideas and opinions on where things went wrong, what Holmes could have and should have done, but the bottom line is, she blew the chance to be an inspirational leader and a role model. The struggle of female entrepreneurs, especially women of color, is no secret. Holmes did have a better chance than most women to become the “first female billionaire tech founder” [1] – she is smart, motivated, hard-working, charismatic and understands how Silicon Valley operates. She comes from a privileged family, had access to opportunities and was well-connected enough to benefit from the support of famous investors at a very early stage of the company. It is unfortunate that what was going to be a huge success story is now in the news for all the wrong reasons.

This book is a cautionary tale for biotech start-up founders and venture capitalists interested in biotech start-ups – providing insight into what makes an effective leader and the responsibilities that come with it, and what employees and venture capitalists should look for when looking to work or invest in a biotech firm. In my opinion, the story of Theranos could be an interesting case study for discussion in an ethics class or at the Tufts Biomedical Business Club. Regardless of whether you are interested in the biotech industry, I think anyone who is a fan of thrillers will enjoy this book. For those interested in something more visual and/or sensationalized, there is an HBO documentary covering this story called “Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” and a movie based on Carreyrou’s book is set to release sometime this year.

References: [1] Carreyrou, John. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. New York, Knopf Publishing Group, May 21st, 2018.

[2] John Carreyrou, “A Prized Startup’s Struggles,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2015.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Disclaimer | Non-Discrimination | Privacy | Terms for Creating and Maintaining Sites

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• v.87(2); 2020 May

By John Carreyrou

By john carreyrou read by will damron, category: business | science & technology, category: business | science & technology | audiobooks.

Jan 28, 2020 | ISBN 9780525431992 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780525431992 --> Buy

Jun 19, 2018 | ISBN 9781984833631 | 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 --> | ISBN 9781984833631 --> Buy

May 21, 2018 | ISBN 9781524731663 | ISBN 9781524731663 --> Buy

May 21, 2018 | 697 Minutes | ISBN 9780525642848 --> Buy

Buy from Other Retailers:

Jan 28, 2020 | ISBN 9780525431992

Jun 19, 2018 | ISBN 9781984833631

May 21, 2018 | ISBN 9781524731663

May 21, 2018 | ISBN 9780525642848

697 Minutes

Buy the Audiobook Download:

• audiobooks.com

About Bad Blood

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The gripping story of Elizabeth Holmes and T heranos — one of the biggest corporate frauds in history—a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley, rigorously reported by the prize-winning journalist. With a new Afterword covering her trial and sentencing, bringing the story to a close. “Chilling … Reads like a thriller … Carreyrou tells [the Theranos story] virtually to perfection.” — The New York Times Book Review In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work. Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings—from journalists to their own employees.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The gripping story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos—one of the biggest corporate frauds in history—a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley, rigorously reported by the prize-winning journalist. With a new Afterword. “Chilling … Reads like a thriller … Carreyrou tells [the Theranos story] virtually to perfection.” — The New York Times Book Review In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work. Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings—from journalists to their own employees.

Listen to a sample from Bad Blood

About john carreyrou.

John Carreyrou, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal for twenty years. For his extensive coverage of Theranos, Carreyrou was awarded the George Polk Award for Financial Reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished… More about John Carreyrou

Product Details

Category: business | science & technology, category: business | science & technology | audiobooks, you may also like.

A Promised Land

Just Mercy (Movie Tie-In Edition)

The Splendid and the Vile

Killers of the Flower Moon (Movie Tie-in Edition)

Born a Crime

Hidden Valley Road

Between the World and Me

The Devil in the White City

A Woman of No Importance

“ Bad Blood is the real be-all end-all of Theranos information…. Bad Blood is wild, and more happens on one page than in many other entire books.” —Margaret Lyons, The New York Times “You will not want to put this riveting, masterfully reported book down. No matter how bad you think the Theranos story was, you’ll learn that the reality was actually far worse.” —Bethany McLean, bestselling coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here “Chilling… Carreyrou tells [this story] virtually to perfection… Reads like a West Coast version of All the President’s Men. “ —Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times Book Review “The definitive account of Theranos’s downfall, detailing its motley crew of executives, legal knife fights, dramatic PR stunts, and skullduggery… Offers a lot for foreign-policy wonks… While Bad Blood is worth reading for its own merits—it’s a stunning feat of journalism that reads like a thriller—it also says a lot about Washington’s facile relationship with Silicon Valley. Most D.C. power brokers know next to nothing about science or technology but increasingly view Silicon Valley tech as a deus ex machina for some of the world’s most complicated challenges. Bad Blood offers a sobering warning of where that type of thinking can lead.” —Robbie Gramer, Foreign Policy “A great and at times almost unbelievable story of scandalous fraud, surveillance, and legal intimidation at the highest levels of American corporate power. . . . The story of Theranos may be the biggest case of corporate fraud since Enron. But it’s also the story of how a lot of powerful men were fooled by a remarkably brazen liar.” —Yashar Ali, New York Magazine “Even if you didn’t follow the story of charismatic Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes (and the ensuing trainwreck) in the news, you will find yourself zipping through a book that proves once again that fact is stranger than fiction. A stunning look into a high-tech hoodwinking; like a high-speed car chase in a book.” —The New York Post’s “28 Most Unforgettable Books of 2018” “In Bad Blood, acclaimed investigative journalist John Carreyrou, who broke the story in 2015, presents comprehensive evidence of the fraud perpetrated by Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes… He unveils many dark secrets of Theranos that have not previously been laid bare…  The combination of these brave whistle-blowers, and a tenacious journalist who interviewed 150 people (including 60 former employees) makes for a veritable page-turner.” —Eric Topol, Nature “Engrossing… Bad Blood boasts movie-scene detail… Theranos, Carreyrou writes, was a revolving door, as Holmes and Balwani fired anyone who voiced even tentative doubts… What’s frightening is how easy it is to imagine a different outcome, one in which the company’s blood-testing devices continued to proliferate. That the story played out as it did is a testament to the many individuals who spoke up, at great personal risk.” —Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Science “In exposing the fudged numbers, boardroom battles and sickening sums of money tossed Theranos’ way, Bad Blood succeeds in highlighting Silicon Valley’s paradoxical blind spot. Insular corporate culture and benevolent media coverage have allowed a monster to grow in the Valley—one that gambles not just with our smart phones or our democracy, but with people’s lives. Bad Blood reveals a crucial truth: outside observers must act as the eyes, the ears and, most importantly, the voice of Silicon Valley’s blind spot.” —B. David Zarley, Paste Magazine’s “16 Best Nonfiction Books of 2018” “Carreyrou blends lucid descriptions of Theranos’s technology and its failures with a vivid portrait of its toxic culture and its supporters’ delusional boosterism. The result is a bracing cautionary tale about visionary entrepreneurship gone very wrong.” — Publishers Weekly (Starred) “Crime thriller authors have nothing on Carreyrou’s exquisite sense of suspenseful pacing and multifaceted character development in this riveting, read-in-one-sitting tour de force…. Carreyrou’s commitment to unraveling Holmes’ crimes was literally of life-saving value.” —Booklist (Starred Review) “Eye-opening… A vivid, cinematic portrayal of serpentine Silicon Valley corruption… A deep investigative report on the sensationalistic downfall of multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley biotech startup Theranos. Basing his findings on hundreds of interviews with people inside and outside the company, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Carreyrou rigorously examines the seamy details behind the demise of Theranos and its creator, Elizabeth Holmes… [Carreyrou] brilliantly captures the interpersonal melodrama, hidden agendas, gross misrepresentations, nepotism, and a host of delusions and lies that further fractured the company’s reputation and halted its rise.” — Kirkus

Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award WINNER 2018

Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network

Raise kids who love to read

Today's Top Books

Want to know what people are actually reading right now?

An online magazine for today’s home cook

Just for joining you’ll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members.

Tuberculosis has haunted humanity for millennia—it’s even been found in Egyptian mummies.

Out for blood

The inside story of the Theranos scandal is almost too wild to believe.

I don’t read a lot of page turners. I often find myself unable to put a book down—but they’re not the kinds of books that would keep most people glued to their chairs. Still, I recently found myself reading a book so compelling that I couldn’t turn away.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou details the rise and fall of Theranos. If you aren’t familiar with the Theranos story, here’s the short version: the company promised to quickly give you a complete picture of your health using only a small amount of blood. Elizabeth Holmes founded it when she was just 19 years old, and both she and Theranos quickly became the darlings of Silicon Valley. She gave massively popular TED talks and appeared on the covers of Forbes and Fortune .

By 2013, Theranos was valued at nearly $10 billion and even partnered with Walgreens to put their blood tests in stores around the country. The problem? Their technology never worked. It never came close to working. But Holmes was so good at selling her vision that she wasn’t stopped until after real patients were using the company’s “tests” to make decisions about their health. She and her former business partner are now facing potential jail time on fraud charges, and Theranos officially shut down in August.

The public didn’t know about Theranos’ deception until Carreyrou broke the story as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Because he was so integral to the company’s demise, Bad Blood offers a remarkable inside look.

Some of the details he shares are—for lack of a better word—insane. Holmes would invite prospective investors to the lab, so they could get their blood tested on a Theranos machine. The device had been programmed to show a really slow progress bar instead of an error message. When results didn’t come back right away, Holmes sent the investors home and promised to follow up with results.

As soon as they left, an employee would remove the blood sample from the device and transfer it to a commercial blood analyzer. Her investors got their blood tested by the same machines available in any lab in the country, and they had no idea.

There’s a lot Silicon Valley can learn from the Theranos mess. To start, a company needs relevant experts on its board of directors. The Theranos board had some heavy hitters—including several former Cabinet secretaries and senators—but for most of the company’s existence, none of them had any expertise in diagnostics. If they had, they might have noticed the red flags a lot sooner.

Health technology requires a different approach than other kinds of technology, because human lives are on the line. Carreyrou writes a lot about how Holmes idolized Steve Jobs and his unwillingness to compromise on his vision. That approach is okay for consumer electronics—if a new phone doesn’t work as promised, no one gets hurt—but it’s irresponsible for a health company. Holmes pushed a vision of what Theranos could be, not what it actually was, and people suffered as a result.

“'Bad Blood' is a cautionary tale about the virtues of celebrity.”

Bad Blood is also a cautionary tale about the virtues of celebrity. On the surface, Holmes was everything Silicon Valley loves in a CEO: charismatic and convincing with a memorable personal story made for magazine profiles. There’s nothing wrong with that on its own. A rock star CEO can be a huge boon for a startup. But you can’t let fame become the most important thing.

Theranos is the worst-case scenario of what happens when a CEO prioritizes personal legacy above all else—but I hope that people don’t use it as an excuse to write off the next young woman with a big idea. I also don’t want Bad Blood to scare people away from next-gen diagnostics. Theranos went to extraordinary lengths to get around quality standards. The industry is highly regulated, and new diagnostics undergo rigorous testing.

Bad Blood tackles some serious ethical questions, but it is ultimately a thriller with a tragic ending. It’s a fun read full of bizarre details that will make you gasp out loud. The story almost feels too ridiculous to be real at points (no wonder Hollywood is already planning to turn it into a movie ). I think it’s the perfect book to read by the fire this winter.

Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World is an essential antidote to environmental doomsday-ism.

The Song of the Cell proves that Siddhartha Mukherjee is one of the best science writers working today.

Vaclav Smil has written “a brief history of hype and failure."

Some favorites from 2023, including a new playlist.

This is my personal blog, where I share about the people I meet, the books I'm reading, and what I'm learning. I hope that you'll join the conversation.

Q. How do I create a Gates Notes account?

A. there are three ways you can create a gates notes account:.

• Sign up with Facebook. We’ll never post to your Facebook account without your permission.
• Sign up with Twitter. We’ll never post to your Twitter account without your permission.
• Sign up with your email. Enter your email address during sign up. We’ll email you a link for verification.

Q. Will you ever post to my Facebook or Twitter accounts without my permission?

A. no, never., q. how do i sign up to receive email communications from my gates notes account, a. in account settings, click the toggle switch next to “send me updates from bill gates.”, q. how will you use the interests i select in account settings, a. we will use them to choose the suggested reads that appear on your profile page..

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

April 4, 2024

• Sheila Heti interviews Lauren Oyler
• In conversation with poet Samer Abu Hawwash
• A poetics of living rebellion

• Bookreporter
• ReadingGroupGuides
• AuthorsOnTheWeb

The Book Report Network

Sign up for our newsletters!

Regular Features

Author spotlights, "bookreporter talks to" videos & podcasts, "bookaccino live: a lively talk about books", favorite monthly lists & picks, seasonal features, book festivals, sports features, bookshelves.

• Coming Soon

Newsletters

• Weekly Update
• On Sale This Week
• Spring Preview
• Winter Reading
• Holiday Cheer
• Fall Preview
• Summer Reading

Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, bad blood: a kate shugak novel.

Dana Stabenow is a native of Alaska, and she wraps her stories in the mystery and wonder that her home state inspires. Imagine a place where a national park encompasses 20 million acres; where natives are given 160-acre homesteads teeming with wildlife and rich with trees and vegetation; where people can still live off the land because of the unspoiled habitats of the salmon and moose. During the winter, folks must survive on the provisions they have put away to see them through the months when travel is nearly impossible. It is here, on America's last frontier, where BAD BLOOD is set and played out by a familiar cast of characters, along with some new ones.

"Dana Stabenow has written many previous award-winning mysteries, yet she continues to present a fresh, uncluttered picture of life in the Alaskan Bush to her ever-growing number of fans. Anyone looking for a fast-paced adventure in a fascinating setting would do well to begin this exciting series of books."

As one might guess, the environment and cultural heritage of the Aleuts, Athabascans and a few smaller tribes have produced many interesting individuals. The traditionalists, the adventuresome and the rebellious all have a place in Alaska and in Stabenow's stories. Even those like Bobby Clark --- war hero, paraplegic and now the “voice of Park radio” --- are affected by the sheer awesomeness of this little known area of the United States. And all have developed their own unique characteristics designed to fit them in.

The Kushtakans and Kuskulanans have been at odds for a hundred years, and it seemed like only a matter of time before the bad blood between the tribes would lead to bloodshed. It happens when young Tyler Mack from the Kushtaka tribe is found stuffed into a basket of his uncle's fish wheel. Tyler's death is blamed on the Kuskulanans, regardless of the lack of apparent motive or evidence. Immediately the natural vigilance of the Kushtakans becomes hyper-vigilance. Meanwhile, the Kuskulanans prepare to be blamed for the death and devise ways to fortify their defenses.

Sergeant Jim Chopin is the Park lawman and is fully aware that neither of these tribes will be forthcoming when it comes to helping him discover the truth, as both sides being more interested in pointing fingers and casting blame. Since he is still considered an “outsider” by many of the Park rats (as they refer to themselves), he asks his friend and lover, Kate Shugak, to assist in questioning the families involved. As a former investigator for the District Attorney's office, Kate often has the skill and native savvy to prevail when Chopper Jim needs help.

As subsequent deaths occur, the mystery deepens and suspense builds when obvious leads prove to be dead ends. Added into the mix of Aleutian culture, traditional mores and familiar characters is a modern-day story of Romeo and Juliet. And, in addition to a drug and bootlegging operation gone awry, there are the constant moral and ethical questions that arise despite the story's unique location and situation.

Dana Stabenow has written many award-winning mysteries, yet she continues to present a fresh, uncluttered picture of life in the Alaskan Bush to her ever-growing number of fans. Anyone looking for a fast-paced adventure in a fascinating setting would do well to begin this exciting series of books.

Reviewed by Maggie Harding on March 1, 2013

Bad Blood: A Kate Shugak Novel by Dana Stabenow

• Publication Date: August 27, 2013
• Genres: Fiction , Mystery
• Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
• ISBN-10: 1250036968
• ISBN-13: 9781250036964

Inside the Big Business of Blood

Blood donation is meant to be free. but there’s an enormous exception: plasma..

In the ICU, we use blood—sometimes, by the gallon. A patient with, say, a gushing stomach ulcer might need transfusion after transfusion to keep the heart beating until the hemorrhage stops. Such blood products are not prescribed by physicians like me in “whole” form, but rather in parts that are separated after collection before being hung on IV poles at the bedside. Wine-red, pint-sized bags of red blood cells boost the blood’s capacity to transport oxygen; straw-colored thin liquid called plasma replenishes the proteins that form clots; yellow bags of cell fragments called platelets likewise help to staunch a bleed.

Although I use blood often, until recently I hadn’t thought much about its provenance beyond the general knowledge that we rely on good-natured volunteers to donate it. But the truth of blood is murkier. While blood is mostly the gift of donors, some products come from the market. Plasma contains important proteins that can be isolated and used therapeutically for a range of ailments, from autoimmune disease to bleeding conditions. In the ICU, for example, we use one plasma-derived product to rapidly restore the blood’s ability to clot for some bleeding patients on blood thinners (at the cost of thousands of dollars for a single dose), and another less expensive product to expand the blood’s volume and improve circulation. These products are manufactured by pharmaceutical firms that pay people to offer their veins and give their plasma at collection facilities spread across the country. Plasma is today a big and growing global industry, projected to be worth $47 billion by 2029, and the United States is the world leader in its “production”: By one estimate, plasma constitutes nearly 3 percent of American exports.

Previous reporting has drawn attention to the global plasma industry, and the exploitative problem of paid “donation.” An illuminating new book, Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry , by journalist Kathleen McLaughlin, depicts the blood trade as yet another manifestation of our society’s deep inequities: For Americans tight on cash, selling plasma has become an increasingly common type of “gig” work.

The largely overlooked emergence of a disenfranchised, atomized, gig-working class of plasma sellers—so keenly illustrated by McLaughlin—is deeply troubling, both for what it reveals about inequality in America but also, potentially, for the health of the blood workers themselves. At the same time, it is worth noting that the emergence of this workforce was made possible, indeed made necessary, by an even larger problem: the transformation of blood into a commodity in the first place.  

The global plasma industry has, to say the least, a troubling past. McLaughlin opens with a discussion of an HIV outbreak in the China in the 1990s, where the transition to a market-based economy under Deng Xiaoping led to a new age of market capitalism—including a flourishing plasma industry in the province of Henan. Farmers found that they could suddenly sell a half liter of blood for $8 as often as every few days, a payment that was “impossible to resist” for the impoverished. But although “the smell of blood started as the scent of wealth,” she writes, “it became the odor of death.” Without adequate safeguards and protections, the supply was soon contaminated by HIV—and an estimated 1 million people were rapidly infected. The authorities shut down Henan’s plasma industry and tried to hush the whole thing up.  

There has also been scandal close to home. In Arkansas, a biomedical company based in Little Rock began draining plasma from prisoners in exchange for miniscule payments beginning in the 1960s, a system that continued through Bill Clinton’s governorship into the ’90s. The plasma was sold to pharmaceutical companies who exported it globally at profit, again contributing to HIV outbreaks abroad.

The modern plasma industry has put safeguards in place. For one thing, in addition to testing donors for infectious diseases, new laboratory procedures can kill viruses in plasma, ensuring a safe supply. Plasma is also no longer taken from prisoners as far as I am aware, at least in the U.S. Yet the system of paid donations continues to take blood from the poor and give it to the wealthy. “In many parts of this country,” McLaughlin notes, “the strip-mall plasma extraction center has become as much of a community institution as a Dollar Store or a Walmart.”

As much as 8 percent of the U.S. adult population sells plasma each year, some upward of 100 times annually. Plasma extraction facilities are disproportionately located in disadvantaged communities, although there is no typical plasma seller per se : McLaughlin interviews college students in a small Idaho town who sell plasma for some extra pocket cash, and more desperate donors in Flint, Michigan, a city where a slew of plasma extraction centers have arisen in the post-industrial dust. She talks to a woman in Texas who is forced into plasma-selling to pay off fines for various petty infractions. And she visits a border town in Texas where, until recently, some 5 to 10 percent of the U.S. plasma supply was collected, mostly from Mexican citizens who took day trips across the border to sell blood for some much-needed cash.

The potential health impacts of frequent—as often as twice-weekly—plasma donation are unclear and understudied. Subjects in the book describe feeling drained, fatigued, and dehydrated from their sessions. They also have little control over their “workplace”; their labor is contingent, and payment can be unsteady. A person dependent on plasma payments might show up one week only to be turned away, empty-handed, if they have a blood test that is out-of-bounds that day, for instance. (This precarity led to the brief formation, back in the 1930s, of a New York City–based blood sellers’ union—an idea, McLaughlin contends, that perhaps should be resurrected today.)

Inequality hence emerges as the central driver of injustice in her narrative. “Until we fix the underlying problems that make ours an increasingly unequal society,” she writes, “millions of people will be pressed to sell their blood plasma.” I would phrase the issue a bit differently, however. Inequality might explain who sells their blood, but less inequality would not, in itself, alter the reality that the global plasma supply is largely reliant on these plasma sellers. An important question, then, not answered by McLaughlin, is whether we should or could operate a more solidaristic, decommodified blood system, or whether it is simply impossible—or too late.

In the 1960s, the British social theorist Richard Titmuss began to argue that blood should never be a commodity. The trade in blood, he showed, was inferior to an egalitarian model reliant on voluntary donation on grounds of “efficiency, of efficacy, of quality,… of safety.” His 1970 treatise, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy , contrasted the U.S. system of blood donation, which at the time was increasingly commercialized and dependent on paid donation, with the British system, used by the National Health Service and entirely dependent on voluntary donors. The voluntary U.K. supply, he found, was far less likely to be contaminated with the potentially deadly hepatitis virus; it was also less wasteful and less susceptible to shortages.

The book had a surprising impact. President Richard Nixon appointed a commission to investigate U.S. blood policy, and the next year the US National Blood Policy embraced a policy of full-voluntary donation as a goal . Around the same time, the World Health Organization, or WHO, similarly called for 100 percent voluntary blood donation worldwide—a framework it still endorses today in the face of rising opposition . And in 1978, the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA,  required blood products be labelled as either paid or voluntary. Hospitals thereafter largely stopped using “paid” blood.

Yet because of the burgeoning demand for large quantities of plasma needed for products such as intravenous immunoglobulin or IVIG, today no nation has a fully voluntary blood supply. While many nations ban paid procurement, they rely on imported (paid) plasma from the U.S., which supplies 70 percent  of the global supply. In response, some have called for an expansion of “pay-for-plasma” throughout the globe—and an abandonment of the WHO embrace of universal voluntary donation.

The paid system of blood procurement isn’t just unfair on those who sell their blood; the fact that blood is a saleable, profit-making commodity also distorts the way it is used in medical care. Plasma-derived products can be enormously expensive: A single infusion of IVIG costs thousands of dollars. As a result, although IVIG is relied on by less than 1 percent of the population, a 2019 article notes , it is one of the most costly drugs for the health care system. The out-of-pocket costs can be burdensome for patients as well, likely putting it out of reach for many.

Meanwhile, because IVIG can be lucrative both for the industry that makes it and for healthcare providers that administer it, it is no doubt overused at times: for some diseases, IVIG has unambiguous and lifesaving benefits, but it has long been employed in clinical scenarios where evidence is lacking . “Much of its use is for off-label indications for which there is minimal evidence of efficacy,” one 2018 study noted. “In nearly all descriptive studies examining prescribing practices in hospitals, off-label use is unexpectedly high and inappropriate use constitutes a significant portion of total IVIG infusions.”    

How plasma is used, and how it is procured, are linked: as long as plasma is sold by pharmaceutical companies, it will be difficult to move toward a system on voluntary donations. The global trade in plasma-based pharmaceuticals by for-profit companies for IVIG alone is valued at $19 billion . Who wants to volunteer their time and body to generate profits for a pharmaceutical firm? (Giving plasma, after all, is more onerous and time consuming compared to the usual procedure of blood donation.) The very essence of voluntary blood procurement—what Titmuss called the “gift donation”—is that it is an altruistic act embedded within a broader egalitarian infrastructure and ethos of medical care. We donate blood to help an anonymous fellow-patient in need, not to expand some business’ balance sheet.

Titmuss argued for voluntary donation on the grounds of quality control, efficiency, and fairness—but there was also a political and, arguably, sentimental element to his argument. “Socialism,” he wrote, “is also about giving,” whereas “the commercialization of blood … represses the expression of altruism.” We know that this impulse is real and potent—it has been sufficient, after all, to supply every unit of red blood cells or platelets I have ever prescribed in the ICU, saving the lives of many of my patients. To restore, indeed expand that impulse, we would first need to decommodify blood products themselves, bringing the production and ownership of plasma-products to the public sphere. Then, and maybe only then, might the “gift relationship” replace cash payment as the basis for the giving of plasma. 

Adam Gaffney is a pulmonary and critical care physician, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and the author of To Heal Humankind: The Right to Health in History .

Review: Lisa Unger gives a classic thriller a modern spin in ‘The New Couple in 5B’

In New York City, real estate can be a blood sport.

Rosie Lowan learns that all too well in “The New Couple in 5B,” the latest psychological thriller from bestselling author (and Tampa Bay area resident) Lisa Unger.

Rosie, the book’s narrator, is a sunny young woman, but Unger wastes no time creating a sense of creeping dread around her. As the novel opens, Rosie is having a very bad day.

She and her dazzlingly charming husband, Chad, have been caring for his dying Uncle Ivan, a retired war photographer. Now that Ivan is gone, they need to get their fledgling careers back up to speed — Chad is an aspiring actor, and Rosie has written one successful true-crime book but is stalled on starting another.

Money is tight, and the rent just went up on their East Village apartment. But today Rosie is lunching at a posh restaurant with Max, her editor and longtime best friend, to talk about her new book proposal, and she’s hopeful.

Then he says, “There’s a lot to like here.”

Rosie worked in publishing before becoming a writer, and she tells us, “That’s publishing code for I don’t like it .”

Truth be told, she doesn’t like it much herself. But Max, ever the friend and skilled editor, talks her through some ways to get excited about the idea. Just as she’s perking up, a disturbing, perhaps deadly accident happens on Broadway, right outside the window they’re seated by.

Just coincidence, of course. Within minutes the victim is taken away and a restaurant employee is cleaning a smear of blood off the window. Just another day in New York City, right?

Rosie goes home badly shaken, only to find another unpleasant surprise. Chad has gone to hear the reading of Ivan’s will, not that they expect anything.

Ivan’s only remaining asset was the gorgeous, sprawling apartment he’d bought long ago in a swanky, century-old Park Avenue building called the Windermere. His only other relative is his long-estranged daughter, Dana. Rosie has assumed that, despite the troubles between them, Ivan would leave the apartment to Dana.

But Dana shows up at Chad and Rosie’s place before Chad does, and she’s vibrating with fury: Ivan left his apartment to them.

For Chad and Rosie, that’s great news. Not only will the apartment be a splendid place to live, it’s worth millions. And there’s one more advantage: Rosie’s book proposal is for a history of the Windermere, not just the beautiful structure itself (built on the site of a church that burned down) but its “famous residents including a bestselling novelist, a celebrated sculptor and a young stage and screen star. It’s also had more than its fair share of dark events — grisly murders, suicides and terrible accidents.”

Now she’ll have an insider’s access while doing her research. She and Chad have already met some of the other residents while caring for Ivan. Rosie is especially intrigued by Abi, the reserved but elegant doorman who seems somehow to always be on duty and able to anticipate the tenants’ needs. He’s worked at the Windermere for decades and, Rosie is sure, will be a source for its secrets.

There are also the longtime neighbors across the hall from Ivan’s place, an older couple named Charles and Ella Aldridge, who enjoy hosting parties. They’re most welcoming to Rosie and even take an interest in her efforts to get pregnant.

But Dana’s anger doesn’t dissipate. Odd things happen. The old stories Rosie uncovers about the Windermere are even darker than she had supposed, and she begins to wonder about its present residents.

Then someone connected to the Windermere dies, and then someone else.

If some of this reminds you of “Rosemary’s Baby,” the classic 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin or the terrific 1968 movie based on it, it’s supposed to. Unger scatters references to that tale through her book like breadcrumbs — or bone fragments — and builds the same atmosphere of a young woman caught amid slowly enveloping terror, but she puts her own entirely modern spin on it.

Unger’s last book, “Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six,” took effective advantage of a remote mountain cabin as its setting. In this book, she brings just as much foreboding to the most urbane setting imaginable.

Unger skillfully weaves Rosie’s first-person narration in the present with chapters set in the past that hold some of the book’s most effective twists. And she keeps the reader guessing as the threats escalate: Is the devil in the details at the Windermere, or just the evil that men do?

The New Couple in 5B

By Lisa Unger

Park Row Books, 375 pages, $28.99

©2024 Tampa Bay Times. Visit at tampabay.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

• Manage Account

Travis Kelce Does a Victory Dance to Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’ While Golfing

The tight end and pop star recently returned from a romantic vacation to the Bahamas.

By Hannah Dailey

Hannah Dailey

• Share this article on Facebook
• Share this article on Twitter
• Share this article on Flipboard
• Share this article on Pinit
• + additional share options added
• Share this article on Reddit
• Share this article on Linkedin
• Share this article on Whatsapp
• Share this article on Email
• Print this article
• Share this article on Comment
• Share this article on Tumblr

Taylor Swift is always with Travis Kelce , even when she’s not actually with him. While the Kansas City Chiefs tight end was out golfing recently, one of his friends started playing the pop star’s 2014 smash “Bad Blood” on the course, prompting an adorable victory dance from the football star.

Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs Teammate Hopes He & Taylor Swift ‘Start a Family…

Trending on billboard.

After watching his ball sail away, the Ohio native walks toward the camera and, using his club as an air guitar, starts dancing and singing along to the pre-chorus. “Oh, it’s so sad to think about the good times, you and I,” he mouths along.

The clip comes shortly after Kelce and Swift went on a romantic vacation to the Bahamas . In photos from the trip, the couple enjoyed their time on the beach and held hands on a dock.

His golfing excursion isn’t the first time Kelce has jammed out to “Bad Blood” in recent weeks. In addition to rocking out to Swift performing the 1989 hit live at her Eras Tour shows in Australia and Singapore, he sang a snippet of the track on an episode of his New Heights podcast earlier this month.

While discussing NFL quarterback Kenny Pickett’s recent trade from the Pittsburgh Steelers to the Eagles, he said, “Kenny and the Steelers — their relationship ended in …,” before mimicking the pop star’s catchy melody on the final two words: “Bad blood.”

Get weekly rundowns straight to your inbox

Want to know what everyone in the music business is talking about?

Get in the know on.

Billboard is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Billboard Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

optional screen reader

Charts expand charts menu.

• Billboard Hot 100™
• Billboard 200™
• Hits Of The World™
• TikTok Billboard Top 50
• Song Breaker
• Year-End Charts
• Decade-End Charts

Music Expand music menu

• R&B/Hip-Hop

Culture Expand culture menu

Media expand media menu, business expand business menu.

• Business News
• Record Labels
• View All Pro

Pro Tools Expand pro-tools menu

• Songwriters & Producers
• Artist Index
• Royalty Calculator
• Market Watch
• Industry Events Calendar

Billboard Español Expand billboard-espanol menu

• Cultura y Entretenimiento

Honda Music Expand honda-music menu

• Kindle Store
• Kindle eBooks
• Business & Money

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Audiobook Price: $17.72 $17.72

Save: $8.23 $8.23 (46%)

Buy for others

Buying and sending ebooks to others.

• Select quantity
• Buy and send eBooks
• Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup Kindle Edition

• Print length 353 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date May 21, 2018
• File size 13644 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

Customers who bought this item also bought

From the Publisher

Editorial reviews, amazon.com review, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B078VW3VM7
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 1st edition (May 21, 2018)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 21, 2018
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 13644 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 353 pages
• #2 in Biomedical Engineering
• #2 in Biotechnology (Kindle Store)
• #3 in Venture Capital (Kindle Store)

Videos for this product

Click to play video

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Amazon Videos

About the author

John carreyrou.

John Carreyrou is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a nonfiction author. His first book, "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup," chronicles Silicon Valley's biggest fraud. Please direct any speaking queries to [email protected]

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Start Selling with Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Becky Lynch talks life in a WWE family, why 'it's more fun to be the bad guy'

Colleen Hoover and Stephen King have sold millions of books, but neither has ever used one of their tomes as a weapon in a pro wrestling match. In that regard, Becky Lynch is already breaking new ground in book publicity.

“I was like, 'Let me just sneak one under the ring for safekeeping and also maybe I could use it for things like paper cuts but also just standard bashing,'” says the WWE star born Rebecca Quin about busting out a copy of her new memoir “Becky Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl” (in stores now) last week during a “last woman standing” match on “ Monday Night Raw .” (For the record, she walloped opponent Nia Jax with her book – the hardcover edition, natch – as well as a kendo stick and a fire extinguisher.)

The biography chronicles her journey from growing up in Dublin, Ireland, a wrestling-loving dreamer to signing up with WWE in 2013 to ultimately main-eventing WrestleMania . She also offers a no-holds-barred introduction to the business for new fans, with tales of in-ring friends and foes as well as her big loves – these days, that’s husband/co-worker Colby Lopez (aka WWE world heavyweight champion Seth Rollins ) and their 3-year-old daughter, Roux.

“I just tried to be honest with myself,” Quin says, adding author to her resume alongside wrestler, actor and former flight attendant. “You have to really reflect and go, ‘When were you lying to yourself?’ Because there's lots of times in life that we lie to ourselves but we don't realize until afterward."

Quin begins a book tour this week, recently hung out with President Joe Biden and soon wrestles Rhea Ripley for the women’s world championship at WrestleMania XL (April 6-7). She talks with USA TODAY a couple of days after her "Raw" appearance about the new memoir and her wrestling life. 

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

Question: What was the writing process like for “The Man”? 

Rebecca Quin: I really just stole time from things. Like if my daughter wanted to watch “Toy Story,” I would be sitting there writing. I didn't have any process where it was like, “Let me get up at 9 a.m. and seal myself off.” It was like, where can I write? And it didn't matter what kind of distractions were going on. I would be backstage at live events, just writing. Oftentimes I kind of liked that a little bit more. It was the white noise of everything and maybe I'd hear something that would spark some inspiration.

Congratulations are in order since you officially became an American citizen last week. You write about first visiting here as a kid with your mom, but has that been something you’ve wanted for a while?

Yeah, absolutely. I've always looked at America as, it's such a cliche but, look, the land of opportunity, and it's gifted me that. And more than anything, it's given me my family: I have an American daughter and I have an American husband. So I wanted to be part of that immediate American family and then the communal American family.

You’re 48 hours removed from your book-bashing brawl, where you won after jumping off a ladder and leg-dropping a woman through a table. Are you still sore at this point or have the butt callouses built up really nice over the years?

You definitely become calloused as a wrestler. After having my daughter and coming back, I remember hitting the ropes for the first time in a year or whatever it was, and my body just felt like it was going to crumple into dust, which thankfully it did not. But after having that match, oh yeah, I'm sore. My daughter wants to play and she has all these games. She loves to play Scar and Mufasa. I brought her to Broadway to see “The Lion King” on stage and she constantly wants to reenact when Scar goes, “Long live the king” and throws him off. I'm Mufasa and I have to fall off the bed, and I'm just like, “Oh, my neck, my back.” It hurts but you just get on with it.

What does Roux think of what her mom and dad do for a living?

She's confused by it. Her dad had a boo-boo, and she's like, “Where'd you get that boo-boo?” And he's like, “I got it working. He pushed me and I fell over.” And she was like, “Does everybody get boo-boos working?” And it's like, “No, see, some people work in an office, some people work on a computer,” so she doesn't understand that all working isn't fighting. I think she's getting worried. He brought her on TV for an entrance shot, and she was like, “Are people going to hurt me?” “No, no, no, baby, no!” Trying to get her to understand that is difficult at 3.

Your character’s currently a heroic babyface but you’ve worked before as a villainous heel, and even been a heel who, thanks to fans, becomes a mega-babyface. What’s your favorite to do?

It's more fun to be the bad guy. You can do no wrong. If people hate you, good, that's your job. If people love you, well, I'm just so good at my job that they love me. (Laughs) It's a lot easier. I remember seeing this meme back in like 2017, the 10 hardest jobs in the world in no particular order. It was a deep sea fisherman and all these just chaotic jobs, and then it was like a WWE babyface . It is quite difficult especially when you go from underdog to being top dog, because people resonate with the journey and the scrappiness.

You write in the book about the backstage meta idiosyncrasies of pro wrestling, including avoiding story lines with Colby. So you’re likely to not get involved now when he and Dwayne Johnson are having a war of words ?

No, probably not. And what's a tricky part is me and the Rock are friends. Whenever (Lopez) has feuds, for the most part to add to them, I will often echo his sentiment. In a marriage, obviously you’ve got to be a team. You’ve got to be on the same side of things. And I always am, he's always No. 1 to me. Then it becomes complicated when it's against people that you have your own friendships and bonds with. But in terms of just our characters, I think our heel characters probably would've meshed a bit better than necessarily the babyface ones.