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lizzyinc99 's review for:
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
4.5/5
This was an excellent look at the Theranos fraud and like the reviews say, really does read like a crime thriller, totally engaging and page-turning. It also has that investigative journalism angle about two-thirds of the way in where the author discusses their involvement in uncovering the story, which is always like catnip to me and done really well in this case. Carreyrou treats his sources with the utmost respect and maybe toots his own horn a little bit but I think it's well-deserved, honestly. He ends by pulling it all together into a critique of the Silicon Valley hype culture, and how bubbles can grow so big they eventually have to burst. It reminds me a bit of the Enron scandal discussed in The Smartest Guys in the Room--the constant need for growth eventually making those running businesses turn to lies to keep it going, and harming innumerable lives over the course of their deceit. My only critique of the main body of the book is that chapters are generally broken up by the sources they came from, and while it's generally done in a linear timeline, it can be a bit hard to follow the story of Theranos from beginning to end, especially the particular products they were developing and using at each point.
The afterword added in 2023 is well worth a read because it discusses Holmes and Balwani's sentencing, although the focus is really on Holmes's trial, with Balwani's being more of an afterthought right at the end. This part gets a little lost in the details for me, possibly because the focus shifts from the harm Theranos was doing to people's health to the fraud they committed to investors (which I think was the less serious crime), but that's not really Carreyrou's fault as that is mainly what she was being charged with. The writing is maybe a little too play-by-play for me but he does pull it into a solid thesis at the end. My main gripe with it is perhaps a small part, but it bothered me nonetheless. While I don't doubt that Holmes was the mastermind (or at least one of them) of the fraud with her own agency, I don't think that her and Balwani texting about their love necessarily disproves that he abused her, as the prosecutors seemed to argue, and Carreyrou didn't really interrogate this at all. Maybe it's just because he works for the right-leaning Wall Street Journal, but it did bother me. Overall, though, this was a satisfying ending to a thrilling read and I'd definitely recommend it for any fans of investigative journalism and scammer stories!
This was an excellent look at the Theranos fraud and like the reviews say, really does read like a crime thriller, totally engaging and page-turning. It also has that investigative journalism angle about two-thirds of the way in where the author discusses their involvement in uncovering the story, which is always like catnip to me and done really well in this case. Carreyrou treats his sources with the utmost respect and maybe toots his own horn a little bit but I think it's well-deserved, honestly. He ends by pulling it all together into a critique of the Silicon Valley hype culture, and how bubbles can grow so big they eventually have to burst. It reminds me a bit of the Enron scandal discussed in The Smartest Guys in the Room--the constant need for growth eventually making those running businesses turn to lies to keep it going, and harming innumerable lives over the course of their deceit. My only critique of the main body of the book is that chapters are generally broken up by the sources they came from, and while it's generally done in a linear timeline, it can be a bit hard to follow the story of Theranos from beginning to end, especially the particular products they were developing and using at each point.
The afterword added in 2023 is well worth a read because it discusses Holmes and Balwani's sentencing, although the focus is really on Holmes's trial, with Balwani's being more of an afterthought right at the end. This part gets a little lost in the details for me, possibly because the focus shifts from the harm Theranos was doing to people's health to the fraud they committed to investors (which I think was the less serious crime), but that's not really Carreyrou's fault as that is mainly what she was being charged with. The writing is maybe a little too play-by-play for me but he does pull it into a solid thesis at the end. My main gripe with it is perhaps a small part, but it bothered me nonetheless. While I don't doubt that Holmes was the mastermind (or at least one of them) of the fraud with her own agency, I don't think that her and Balwani texting about their love necessarily disproves that he abused her, as the prosecutors seemed to argue, and Carreyrou didn't really interrogate this at all. Maybe it's just because he works for the right-leaning Wall Street Journal, but it did bother me. Overall, though, this was a satisfying ending to a thrilling read and I'd definitely recommend it for any fans of investigative journalism and scammer stories!