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A review by laurapk
Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George
4.0
It's a bloody funny, well written book, with a couple of errors in it (that I could identify) and only loosely bound together by the theme of blood. I loved the author's humor and was in stitches particularly while reading the second chapter (on leeches). The chapter about trauma care was less funny but very gripping and delivered some raw emotion. I have little to reproach the author, I liked her writing but I also think the nine chapters were a bit disjointed (with the exception of the two chapters on menstruation, which I believe were separated in an attempt to have nine chapters in a book called Nine Pints).
I would warn against taking all her comments at face value, since I could clearly identify a couple of errors. It's good that the author had an active BS alarm in chapter 9 when interviewing a proponent of using young blood for transfusion, but in reality I don't believe that information should have even been put in there, since the science the interviewee reported is smack in the middle of BS land. Not because it would be impossible to get benefits from young blood transfusions, but because the way he conducts his experiments...they're actually not experiments. He's a crook, or deluded. There were also a couple of scientific errors that I could identify. In the last chapter for example she talks about Sickle Cell Anemia and after correctly stating that the disease is caused by a mutation in the hemoglobin gene, she goes on to say that this diseased hemoglobin will clump together in the patient's vessels. It's the red blood cells that clump, not the hemoglobin, as the hemoglobin is not running free in the blood. The mutated hemoglobin is very rigid and changes the shapes of the red blood cells, which makes them more prone to clump together in small blood vessels. Another issue I had was with her description of vampires, where like all good Brits, she didn't do her homework. Firstly, Vlad the Impaler (Tepes) only set foot in Transylvania as a prisoner, he ruled in the south of Romania (at the time of his rule Transylvania was actually part of Hungary). He may have been a tyrant for the Turks, but he is considered a national hero for having fought said Turks and for being tough on crime. Also, Romanians don't have blood sucking vampire stories. We have evil dead revivals which we call Strigoi, which won't suck your blood but will kill you or terrorize you if you let them in your home. As a result we have a lot of burial traditions meant to appease the dead person and also confuse them so that they can't find their way back home from the cemetery (because that's how you keep communities safe and reduce the consumption of garlic necessary to keep said evil spirits away :) ).
I would warn against taking all her comments at face value, since I could clearly identify a couple of errors. It's good that the author had an active BS alarm in chapter 9 when interviewing a proponent of using young blood for transfusion, but in reality I don't believe that information should have even been put in there, since the science the interviewee reported is smack in the middle of BS land. Not because it would be impossible to get benefits from young blood transfusions, but because the way he conducts his experiments...they're actually not experiments. He's a crook, or deluded. There were also a couple of scientific errors that I could identify. In the last chapter for example she talks about Sickle Cell Anemia and after correctly stating that the disease is caused by a mutation in the hemoglobin gene, she goes on to say that this diseased hemoglobin will clump together in the patient's vessels. It's the red blood cells that clump, not the hemoglobin, as the hemoglobin is not running free in the blood. The mutated hemoglobin is very rigid and changes the shapes of the red blood cells, which makes them more prone to clump together in small blood vessels. Another issue I had was with her description of vampires, where like all good Brits, she didn't do her homework. Firstly, Vlad the Impaler (Tepes) only set foot in Transylvania as a prisoner, he ruled in the south of Romania (at the time of his rule Transylvania was actually part of Hungary). He may have been a tyrant for the Turks, but he is considered a national hero for having fought said Turks and for being tough on crime. Also, Romanians don't have blood sucking vampire stories. We have evil dead revivals which we call Strigoi, which won't suck your blood but will kill you or terrorize you if you let them in your home. As a result we have a lot of burial traditions meant to appease the dead person and also confuse them so that they can't find their way back home from the cemetery (because that's how you keep communities safe and reduce the consumption of garlic necessary to keep said evil spirits away :) ).