A review by mrswythe89
The Family that Couldn't Sleep by D.T. Max

2.0

Light, fast read, entertainingly written. Useful for its go-over of mad cow disease -- I only had a very vague idea of what it was all about because I was fairly young when concern about it was at its height. Very unimpressed by the chapters on the Fore and the treatment of Carleton Gajdusek, a known paedophile -- the sentence that sticks in the mind is one where Max points out that rival scientist Prusiner was notably not on the list of people who supported Gajdusek when he went to jail for molesting kids (one recalls the Polanski petition). Because the only reason why someone would refrain from supporting a paedophile is because out of professional rivalry? Weak. Footnotes on the sources on which Max based his writing about the Fore reveal that they were all written by Western names -- but then I could have told you that without looking.