A review by ahanyok
The Family that Couldn't Sleep by D.T. Max

2.0

Interesting topic but poor execution at key moments. For example, he never questions medical imperialism, racism, and guinea pig testing in Papua New Guinea. He poorly addresses the pedophilia of a Nobel laureate, calling it a sexuality and dismissing it as a reason for him to go to a remote nation in the first place. The author goes on for chapters about this researcher, despite him not finding much, while leaving just a paragraph to the anthropologists that discovered the cannibalistic transmission of Kuru. This and other biases make me question the other history and research he covers.